HST image of NGC 6302, courtesy of NASA/HST (from a press release)

Kevin Volk CSA NIRISS Support Astronomer Space Telescope Science Institute 3700 San Martin Drive Baltimore, MD 21218 USA Phone: 410-338-4409 Fax: 410-338-4211 E-mail: volk AT stsci.edu Web: www.stsci.edu/~volk

Current Position

I am working at STScI in Baltimore as a support astronomer for the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph/Fine Guidance Sensor, which is part of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope mission. The instrument was built by the Canadian Space Agency. As part of this effort my position at STScI is supported from Canada. The NIRISS instrument was previously the Tunable Filter Imager (TFI).

Before moving to Baltimore in the spring of 2009 I had spent 6 years at Gemini Observatory, mostly supporting the mid-infrared instruments Michelle and T-ReCS. Switching to support of the TFI/NIRISS instrument, which is completely different in design and wavelength range than the thermal infrared astronomy I was used to, was quite a big change in duties. Now some years later I am still not entirely used to the change, but I now know a lot more about HgCdTe detectors and grisms than I did before I came here.

Since late March 2014 I have been resident in Alberta, Canada, while still working at STScI. Thanks to the internet and teleworking initiatives I am able to carry out my work while only being physically present at STScI part of the time. I am grateful to the people at CSA, HIA, and STScI who have supported my relocation back to Canada from the United States while allowing me to continue working on the project.

What is a "Support Astronomer" anyway?

• A magnitude/flux density conversion utility, kindly hosted by Geoff Clayton of Louisiana State University. This used to be on my Gemini pages, but those disappeared some 4 years after I left Gemini. Unfortunately I cannot host the page at STScI. If that link is down, another copy can be found here, this one being hosted by Colin Aspin of the University of Hawaii.
• IRAS LRS server page which is only partially functional. One can get the raw or corrected spectra for IRAS sources from the page, but not any plots that used to be produced by the page. This page was originally at the University of Calgary and then at I had a copy at Gemini, but those pages are both gone now. This is a recent attempt to re-do the page. Thanks go to Greg Sloan for providing the host machine for this page at Cornell University. The plots may get added at some point when I have time to look into how to do that in Python.
• The Astronomy Picture of the Day
• AAS Homepage (with access to the AAS Job Register)
• ADS Abstract Service
• SIMBAD Astronomical Database
• The Official U.S. Time page in case you want to know the exact time

Research Interests

• Dust around evolved stars
• Planetary Nebulae and ionized nebulae in general
• "Proto-Planetary Nebulae": stars evolving from the asymptotic giant branch phase to the planetary nebula phase of evolution

Research Collaborators

My research is done in cooperation with various people including:

• Sun Kwok
• Bruce Hrivnak
• Angela Speck
• Ryszard Szczerba

Publication Lists

The list of my refereed publications is here. This is from the ADS Abstract Service searched for "K. Volk" with the papers by Karen Volk, Klaus Volk, Kathryn Volk, and Katharina Volk removed from the list. I have not found a way to search only for my papers without getting at least a few of these other people's papers as well.

A listing of all of my bibliographic references is here.

My publication totals are currently 105 published papers, and 218 total bibliographic references. On the other hand I am the first author on only 21 refereed papers in total; this is partially because I like doing the work better than I like writing up papers once the work is done.

Review Talk at the IAU General Assembly Special Session 16

I attended (part of) the IAU General Assembly in Beijing (August 20-31, 2012) and gave an invited review talk on the 21 and 30 micron features in carbon star spectra at the special session on "Unexplained Spectral Phenomena in the Interstellar Medium". The powerpoint file for the talk can be downloaded at this link. Note that it is a moderately large file (about 18 MBytes) due to having a number of plots/images inside. Whether it will make sense without my words that go along with it is a good question. I wrote a conference paper based on the talk, but that is limited to 2 pages so it is not very detailed. Possibly I will expand the review into a regular publication, if I can figure out where to publish such a thing. It was a fair amount of work getting the review together, but it was educational. Looking at the basics afresh once in a while is quite useful.

Style in Science:

The following front two pages of an astronomy paper from 1865 and the associated colour plate (probably from a colour drawing of the spectra) may be of interest. The style of scientific papers has changed mightily in the 150 years between this paper and ones published now.

I am not sure that the current style is an improvement. At least, not when I write papers. Some others may have more style in writing papers than I do.

End Word:

If you think that you know the right answer to something, the following may give you food for thought: there might be another interpretation that you did not think of.

(Note: the original version of the above image adds "They are also usually wrong." under the word "Simplicity". However I do not like that: there is a big difference between "wrong" and "not what was intended". That is my point here. If the question had said "Find the length of side x", that would have avoided this possible interpretation. And yes of course I know that this is implied in the context of the question, but some of us are literal minded.)