MY RESEARCH

(Click to select descriptive pages)

I am an observational astronomer with interests in stellar evolution.  My students and I work primarily with photometry and spectroscopy in the optical region of the spectrum.  You can link to some of the places I work at below---notably the Gettysburg College Observatory and the National Undergraduate Research Observatory (NURO)----and there are links to PDF versions of selected papers at the end of this page

Areas of Research Include:

  • High precision measurements of eclipsing/spectroscopic binary systems.
  • Properties of open clusters.
  • Rotation and activity in young stars.
  • Light curves of supernovas.
  • Asteroid astrometry and photometry.

I have also published papers on

  • Radial velocity curves of cepheids.
  • Shadow bands at solar eclipses.
  • Nuclear abundances in interstellar clouds using high resolution spectroscopy (my Ph.D. thesis).
  • Physics and astronomy education. (see also Project CLEA pages)

Observatories

Gettysburg College Observatory

Our main research instrument is a 16 inch (0.4m) f/11 Cassegrain equipped with a back-illuminated 1k square CCD camera (SiTE 003B chip, Roper Scientific camera), thermoelectrically cooled.

National Undergraduate Research Observatory (NURO)

The telescope, owned by Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, is a 32in (0.8 m) f/15 Cassegrain with a 2K back-illuminated CCD chip, LN cooled.

A Selection of Papers (PDF format)

* indicates student co-author

Binary Stars

 

Supernovas

Open Clusters

Asteroids

Miscellaneous: Cepheids, Interstellar Lines, etc.

Project CLEA and other Educational Articles