Seminar

The SED Machine

July 19, 2012

When: July 19, 2012 3:30PM

Caltech

Advances in telescopes, detectors, and computing processing power has led to a new field of astronomical study called time-domain astronomy. Time domain means that we continuously monitor large regions of the sky in order to identify dynamic events: explosions, flares, rotations, or orbiting sources. In the coming era, the discovery potential is growing rapidly with new surveys such as PTF2, Catalina Sky Survey, PanSTARRS, and LSST -- yet follow-up capability is not growing at the same pace. It turns out that the best way to leverage precious follow-up capability is to screen objects to determine if they are interesting or not. In this talk I describe the SED Machine, a spectrograph for classifying transients.

Nick Konidaris

I am a Postdoctoral scholar in the Caltech Astronomy department. From September 2008 to today my primary responsibility is to the hands on development and implementation of the MOSFIRE (updated Dec 18th 2010) spectrograph. I serve two roles as an astronomer. First, I'm an instrumentalist. Aside from my MOSFIRE responsibilities, I am in the process of designing a new low resolution spectrograph called the SED Machine for 1 - 4 m telescopes (hopefully for the Palomar 60''). Second, I'm an observer, I work on the DEEP2 and AEGIS surveys. Using data from these surveys, I studied the evolution of the ionized interstellar medium of early type galaxies from z ~ 0.1 to 1. In the future, I plan to be more involved in the science and instrumentation for transient surveys.

Seminar

The SED Machine

July 19, 2012

Nick Konidaris

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