A Year Down Under and an October Astrobite

As of September 29th I've been in Melbourne for a full year now. It's been a long year of working on my PhD, I've moved twice, and I miss Hilo's climate pretty often, but I've also made some amazing friends and discovered a facility for and enjoyment of painting I didn't know I had (about which I promise a post in the next few weeks). I've had artwork exhibited in a public exhibition, and learned that stars and CCDs are infinitely more complicated than I ever dreamed (or wanted to know).

I've done an excellent job of hiding my telescope model behind a pillar in this photo.

In other news I put out a new Astrobite today, on a paper talking about finding the mass of the closest known white dwarf by measuring its gravitational redshift (basically, how much its light is redshifted climbing out of its gravitational well). This one was pretty interesting for me, as the authors used the Hubble Space Telescope and spent some time detailing all the tiny systematic errors in its spectrograph's CCD. Detailing tiny systematic errors in CCDs is pretty much my PhD (or at least it feels like at times) so I could really empathize with what they went through to get a good measurement. I also got some nice comments from two of the paper's authors, so that was cool.


That's it for now! A hui hou!