Current Stuff

Hawk-I observations of the Carina nebula processed by CASU. Click the image for more info and some beautiful images.

I'm co-PI of the WFCAM Transit Survey, an infrared survey for planets around M dwarfs.

 

Monitor is a variability survey in young open clusters and star forming regions, searching for eclipsing binaries and planets.

while out at VISTA we happened to catch meteoroid 2008tc3 just hours before it hit the Sudan.

 

Networks

RoPACS: Rocky Planets Around Cool Stars is a Marie Curie ITN and is currently hiring (including a postdoc at the IoA)

CONSTELLATION is a European Commission FP6 Marie Curie RTN. IoA members include myself and Cathie Clarke.

 

Contact Details

Institute of Astronomy, Madingly Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK

email: sth at ast.cam.ac.uk

Research Interests

I study stars and stellar systems, with a penchant for low mass and degenerate objects. I'm particularly interested in trying to measure fundamental physical parameters (e.g. masses and radii) for very low mass stars, brown dwarfs and exoplanets. I set up the Monitor project with Suzanne Aigrain to discover young eclipsing binaries, and if we get lucky, young extrasolar planets.

Responsibilities

My group, CASU, is responsible for the pipeline processing of a large volume of imaging data. My particular responsibilities include data quality control and photometric calibration for WFCAM and VISTA.

The other half of my time is devoted to GAIA and the development of software to detect transient events in the real time data stream from the spacecraft. We hope to rapidly detect and classify alerting sources before passing them onto the community.

Resources

Publications (link to ADS)

Talks

Teaching (Stellar Astrophysics course slides)

Links

Gaia

CASU

VISTA (Orion Science Verification)

 

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