What do I do?

Michael Richmond
Sep 9, 2024

Here at RIT, I do quite a bit of teaching, both physics and astronomy, at undergraduate and graduate levels. I enjoy public outreach, serve on the board of the Rochester Academy of Science, and participate in the Astronomy Section of the RAS. But I try to keep active in research, too.

• I've written quite a bit of code to analyze astronomical data
  • XVista for image processing and measurement
  • match to match lists of objects and perform astrometry
  • image processing pipelines (or parts thereof) for SDSS , TASS, Tomo-e Gozen
• I spend a lot of time at the RIT Observatory
• Observations of supernova 2011fe
• I also spend time measuring the brightness of variable stars, especially cataclysmic variables
  • RIT observations of the cataclysmic variable WZ Sge
  • Paper on the 2001 outburst of WZ Sge
  • I'm currently monitoring T Corona Borealis (The Blaze Star)
• The Tomo-e Gozen project
• Some notes on reading scientific papers
• For more information

Some notes on reading scientific papers

I've run the local version of a Journal Club for the last few years. It's a good way to try to keep up with the overwhelming flood of astronomical papers. Since there are always more papers to read than one has time to spend, it may be useful to have a method for skimming a paper quickly, in order to determine how much time it's worth spending on it.

I wrote up my thoughts on how one can scan a paper quickly; perhaps they might help you. You can find them in a document describing the very interesting topic of Dyson Spheres.

• Looking for Dyson Spheres is the entire short document describing Dyson Spheres
• How to read a scientific paper is the section on reading papers efficiently

For more information

• You may find some useful information in the notes I've written for the courses I've taught at RIT.
  • On-line material for my courses (look near the end for the graduate courses)
• Measuring the distance to a nearby star via parallax is my idea of a fun project

Copyright © Michael Richmond. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.