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requesting some enlightenment
<the homepage of brandon j swift>
What I try to keep myself busy with. Actual results may vary.

brown dwarfs and pan-starrs I'm in Hawaii working on this now. Well, not right now, but generally now. [ Write more here after you work some more. ]


supernovae Between Spring 2001 and 2005, I worked with Alex Filippenko and Weidong Li as part of the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS),the most successful nearby supernova search in the world. The group operates the robotic Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at Lick Observatory in the mountains east of San Jose, CA. A primary goal is to discover a large sample of low-redshift Type Ia supernovae and follow them extensively with KAIT for multi-color photometry, and in conjunction with spectra we obtain from Lick and Keck Observatories, to compliment and support higher-redshift supernova studies like the High-Z Supernova Search. By better understanding these explosions, they can be made more useful as tools to chart the expansion history of the universe and probe many cosmological parameters like the "dark energy," which seems to be causing the expansion to accelerate. Other goals are to intensively study nearby Type II and Type Ib/c (core-collapse) supernovae, determine supernova rates, and to observe Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) optical afterglows.

The main project I'm working on right now is to make light curves (brightness as a function of time) of all the supernovae in the unfiltered KAIT search images. There have been about 600 supernovae that have gone off in our sample of galaxies since LOSS started back in 1998 and we get unfiltered light curves of all of them for free just by looking at each galaxy once a week or so. Also, I observe frequently with other members of the group at the 3 meter telescope at Lick getting spectra of supernovae or other cool things (like V838 Mon or AGNs). Sometime I'll reorganize our databae of spectra and turn it into a relational database accessible via the web as well.

Here's a list of the supernovae I discovered while checking KAIT images.


c2d sed modeling tool Project from 2 summers in Flagstaff, AZ. I need to write about this.




Abell 1689