Research

Background

I work in the field of astronomical instrumentation at optical and infrared wavelengths. A particular emphasis has been high-angular resolution imaging, especially interferometric aperture synthesis and adaptive optics, but more recently I have worked on projects related to spectroscopy, with an emphasis on high stability and precision.

Publications

A list of publications can be found here but is not always kept up-to-date. An alternative is to look on Google Scholar and ADS.

Current Projects

This is a work in progress, details are to be filled out as time permits…

MROI

Much of my research over the last decade has been dedicated to the design and construction of the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI), a project to build the world’s most ambitious optical array. MROI will be able to image targets 10 times fainter than those accessible with any other interferometer, and it will be able to make images on timescales of hours instead of days (Buscher et al 2013).

Manufacturing metre-sized gratings with nanometre precision

The E-ELT HIRES spectrograph

The MOONS spectrograph for VLT

Past projects

COAST (1999-2003)

ELECTRA and MARTINI (1994-1999)

Sparse aperture masking (1987-1995)

NPOI (1990-1994)

The Mark III interferometer (1990-1993)

COAST (1985-1989)

Notable results

My scientific contributions include a number of significant firsts: