• snow days in balmor

    well, my apartment roof is leaking (again). it snowed seriously last in baltimore about two years ago, and i have some fond memories of taking some long treks through wyman park, treading new paths through the drifts in my ruptured doc martens. i was listening to the wheel of time audiobooks back then and could…

  • the moon is out tonight

    the moon is out tonight

    here’s an image of it that I took for someone special at 6pm, 2023/12/20.

  • my third paper: is it a planet? (no)

    my third paper: is it a planet? (no)

    My third academic paper (that is, the third peer-reviewed research article I’ve written as the lead author) was accepted for publication today in The Astronomical Journal, and is publicly available on arXiv. Similar to my second paper, this result describes our observations of a failed star (a.k.a. a “substellar object”, or “brown dwarf”) that is…

  • november visit to germany

    november visit to germany

    i’ve spent the past two weeks on a work trip to germany, first to heidelberg for two back to back workshops, and then to munich (garching, really) to collaborate at the european southern observatory (eso), who run the paranal observatory in chile i visited last year. now, i’m back in baltimore and enjoying the company…

  • how to study life in other solar systems

    how to study life in other solar systems

    I have a new article out in The Planetary Society that explains at an introductory level how astronomers are using spectroscopy to search for signs of life in the universe.

  • i published another science paper

    i published another science paper

    This past month I published another peer reviewed article as first-author, this time in The Astrophysical Journal. In this paper, we used the VLTI/GRAVITY instrument down in Chile to study the orbit and atmosphere of a failed star.