Welcome

Introduction

Currently I hold a Senior Research Associate position at the University of Cambridge. This position is in large part funded by the EU FP6 ALMA Enhancement programme (see European Union FP6 ALMA Enhancement).

My current activities within the scope of this position are:

• Phase correction and calibration for the Atacama Millimetre Wave Array (ALMA) and in particular development and implementation of advanced algorithms for atmospheric phase correction using the Water Vapour Radiometers (WVRs) operating at 183 GHz.
• Remote sensing of the Earth’s atmosphere using oxygen-line temperature profilers
• Research into galaxy evolution and star-burst galaxies

These pages also have a blog section with updates and news on my research, some smaller notes derived from my research and opportunity for visitors to leave comments. Please visit and subscribe to the atom feed!

Contents

• ALMA
  • Quick pointers
  • Detailed contents
• Out-Of-Focus (OOF) Holography
  • Zernike Polynomials
  • How de-focusing makes wavefront errors more apparent
  • Example of an OOF analysis for the GBT
  • OOF Reduction Software
  • History of the OOF data reduction software
  • Description of the OOF software architecture
  • BNMin1
  • Building the OOF package: worked solutions
  • De-convolution of a Gaussian beam from planetary observations
  • What is OOF Holography?
  • Information on OOF holography
  • Typographical and other errors in published papers
• Understanding Infrared emission from galaxies
  • Modelling absorption and emission of radiation by interstellar dust
  • Mie Extinction
• Galaxy Evolution
  • A gallery of interacting galaxies
  • The history of star formation and mass assembly in early-type galaxies
  • 90 GHz Continuum Observations of Messier 66
  • Analysis of (radio) spectra
• Lectures and related materials
  • Statistics for astronomy graduate course
  • Astrophysical techniques graduate course
• Publication List
  • Refereed publications
  • Technical Memoranda
  • Articles for newsletters
  • arXiv publications/pre-prints
  • PhD Thesis
  • Conference Proceedings
  • Conference Posters
  • Presentations/Talks/Colloquia
  • Telescope observing proposals
  • Informal notes and other materials not formally published
• Technical and general software-related notes
  • Post-processing PGPLOT postscript output
  • PyHLP: Python routines for plotting built on PyX
  • Some notes using the Maxima system

Referencing these pages

In the brackets at the top line and near the bottom of each page on this web site there is an identifier of type “(r. XXX)” where XXX is a number. This number is a unique identifier of the revision of the web-pages, so if you’d like to reference a particular revision of these pages, you can quote this number. I can provide previous revisions of the site on request.

Other sources of information

• My PhD era web-pages are archived at: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~bn204/phd_era/index.html (obviously this is badly out-of-date)
• These pages have been recently redesigned and moved to a different publishing platform. All of the contents should remain, but it is possible something got lost along the way! If you think anything is missing, please let me know. The old pages are permanently archived at: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~bn204/mk2/
• My old home page at NRAO is at: http://www.gb.nrao.edu/~bnikolic/index.html (likewise out of date)