PAIRITEL Team Members | |
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Joshua S. BloomPrincipal Investigator |
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Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley | |
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Bloom has been working in fields of transient astronomy since the
beginning of his academic career. As a graduate student at Caltech, he
worked on gamma-ray bursts during the beginning of the afterglow
era (c. 1997), he was on the front lines of the Caltech follow-up
group as an observer. For part of his thesis, he built the JCAM
(Jacobs Camera) for use on the 200-inch telescope at Palomar
Observatory. The camera is a dual-band optical imager and was designed
to observe GRB afterglows at high cadence. At Harvard, in collaboration
with the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Bloom began the
automation of the 2MASS telescope in early 2003. Seeking to use GRBs
to study the early universe, he is a founding member of the GRAASP Collaboration (Gamma-Ray Burst
Afterglows as Probes). Bloom also has begun a project to
internationalize the standards for transient message reporting and
follow-up, called rtVO (Real-Time
Virtual Observatory).
Bloom has authored over 70 refereed papers primarily on gamma-ray bursts. His 2002 PhD thesis made the case that gamma-ray bursts arise from the death of massive stars, which was later confirmed in 2003. |
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Cullen Blake |
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Graduate Student, Harvard College | |
| Blake is a recent graduate of Princeton University, where he worked on the Princeton Variability Survey with Bohdan Paczynski. His primary research interests are in Brown Dwarfs and Gamma-Ray Bursts. Blake has written all of the database and scheduling software for PAIRITEL, using MySQL, PHP, and Python. He is now working on the automatic pipeline for PAIRITEL reductions. |
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Dan L. Starr |
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Data Analyst, Gemini Observatory (Hawaii) | |
| Starr is a graduate of Univ. of Washington. Before moving to Gemini, he worked as software engineer and data analyst for RAPTOR in Los Alamos, NM. RAPTOR is an innovative system designed to find and follow-up visible light transients in real-time. Starr has written most of the telescope control systems for PAIRITEL, using Python. |
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Wayne Peters |
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Instrument Specialist, Mt. Hopkins | |
| Wayne has worked for two years on the PAIRITEL hardware. He designed and built the wireless control of the dome shutter for PAIRITEL. He also constructed the tiltometer used to find zenith. He and Bob Hutchins installed new motors for the dome shutter. |
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Bob Hutchins |
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Engineer, Mt. Hopkins | |
| Bob installed in the new solar panel system to provide a power bus to the PAIRITEL dome. He and Wayne worked to install the new motors for the domeshutter as well as the limit switches. |
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Emilio E. Falco |
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Director of the Ridge Telescopes at Mt. Hopkins, CfA | |
| Falco works on systematic studies of strong gravitational lensing, to estimate the dark matter contents of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and to establish significant constraints on the parameters of the standard cosmological model. |
Last modified: Mon Oct 18 23:04:47 MST 2004