Reflections
Reflections
I'm mentoring an undergrad for the first time and I'm realizing more how much effort it takes to start someone on research from scratch. Its so different from how classes work there is really no script to it. We are working on studying Hubble observations of Jupiter from 2015 to now. At the moment most variability measurements of gas giant exoplanets or brown dwarfs are only over one or two rotation periods. We need to move from "weather" into long-term climate observations, which is possible with a small observatory in space. Using Jupiter and current brown dwarf data, we can estimate what sensitivity is needed.
I've been gaming a lot less lately. I reached Platinum 4 in League of Legends, which is much higher than my original goal this season. There is no point in practicing because the whole map will change in January. I also have some JWST Observations that got executed today and LBTI observations to plan for in December and January.
More Posts from Infraredastronomy and Others
Last week I attended the joint meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists and National Society of Hispanic Physicists in Houston, Texas. I enjoyed seeing friendly colleagues and meeting new researchers. It was an honor to give an invited talk in the astronomy session and I'm happy I could convey the importance of brown dwarfs to folks outside of my subfield.
The first photo is everyone from the University of Arizona (minus Carlos Vargas) who attended. Graduate students Jasmin Washington (Steward Observatory, center) and Kiana McFadden (Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, left) presented their work as well. I had fun walking around an exploring downtown Houston in the evenings. I absolutely adored the POST, which had an open plan plant store with a stage for jazz.
A History of Black Futures
This week I gave an invited talk at NASA Goddard and took a day to visit the Afrofuturism exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I picked up the book inspired by this exhibit a year ago during an NYC trip and have been itching to go since.
This specific display in the photo made me tear up. From left to right it shows the flight suit of Trayvon Martin, the flight suit of Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek, and the flight suit of astronaut and former administrator of NASA Charles Bolden. Three scenarios: A future taken away, a future imagined, and a future that has been realized. When Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, he also took away his ability to be creative, curious, and explore the world around him.
After giving colloquia at Wesleyan and the University of Michigan, I took some time to visit the Motown Museum in Detroit. The museum is the site of the first Motown headquarters and recording studio. It was such a pleasure to see an important piece of Black history.
A comparison of available data for Jupiter in 1969 compared to 1996, since then we've learned even more. Paper Link
Reflections
Spring semester finally ended and things are slowing down just for a little bit. I have about a month before going to present a poster at SPIE and then a talk at Cool Stars 22. There are still many things to be done for my LBT/NOMIC work, but I'm mostly excited to go to my first in person SPIE conference. I started working on infrared detectors right before the pandemic hit and then the last year of graduate school along with some health issues knocked out potential travel.
This past week I finally had the time to do a deep dive back into JWST pipeline end-to-end. Many of the time-series observations done with JWST/NIRSpec have been for spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets. My group got the first time-series observations of a brown dwarf with JWST at medium resolution. There was no space-based observatory prior to JWST that could take time-series spectra in the infrared at a resolution greater than a few hundred. With this extra resolution power hopefully the brown dwarf community can start distinguishing photometric changes from specific molecular gases and cloud species.
I take my driving test tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!
