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Studying astrophysics at San Francisco State University. Currently doing work at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with the Nearby Supernova Factory.
Graduated May 27, 2006, B.S. Physics, Minor: Astronomy. Will begin graduate school at Indiana University in the astronomy department beginning Fall 2006. I will be moving to Bloomington to begin a summer job with the Indiana University Graduate School working for AGEP at the end of June.
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Summer 2004 and 2005 took me to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey II on the supernova search component. See abstracts below:
Summer 2005 Abstract (for poster at SACNAS 2005 Conference)
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey II (SDSS-II) is a 3 year extension of a five year project to survey approximately a quarter of the sky for astronomical objects. SDSS-II has three main components; (i) completion of the five year survey, (ii) mapping structure and stellar makeup of the Milky Way Galaxy and (iii) detect and measure light curves for a large sample of supernovae (SNe). With repeat imaging of a strip of sky (about 2.5 deg wide by ~110 deg long) over the course of three 3-month campaigns (Sept-Nov. 2005-7), the search is intended to gather multi-band light curves for ~200 Type Ia supernovae in the redshift range z=0.1-0.3. Software has been developed for rapid processing of images that will identify astronomical objects as possible supernovae candidates by subtracting new images from template images. Further evaluation by the human eye of the subtracted images is necessary, as all objects detected by this process will not be supernovae. This poster will acquaint the reader with the web page we created so that collaborators from anywhere in the world, with Internet access, will be able to participate in selecting interesting candidates for follow-up observation. The web page will display the template, search and subtracted images in g, r and i filters along with additional information to assist in this determination. This method was used in an engineering run performed in the fall of 2004 which yielded 254 candidates and 41 confirmed SNe of various types and 16 type Ia's.
Summer 2004 Abstract
The objective of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is to survey one quarter of the entire sky. Using a wide-field imaging camera attached to a 2.5-m telescope, the survey will produce images in five filters of over 100 million astronomical objects such as stars, galaxies, and quasars. An extension of SDSS has been proposed in part to search for supernovae over the next three years. The search is done by scanning over the same area of the sky every few days and comparing old images (template) to new images (search image) and examining the difference (subtracted image). Software is currently under development to process the images and create a list of supernovae candidates. An evaluation of the candidates is necessary to select a sub-set for follow up spectroscopy. For this evaluation, we have developed a Java routine that interfaces to a mySQL database of candidates, retrieves astronomical image data saved in FITS format, and displays candidate images as 2-dimensional histograms via the Java AIDA interface. The routine displays histograms of the template, search, and the subtracted images in three filters. The routine can be easily modified to add plots as we gain experience in what information is most useful. The routine has been demonstrated on existing SDSS data, to discriminate between candidates and artifacts.
Email: dlamenti"AT"astro"DOT"indiana"DOT"edu
Favorite molecule: H2O
Favorite coordinate system: Polar Spherical
Favorite state: Ground state (n=1) i.e. I like stability.
Updated July 11, 2006