Andy’s Astronomy Page

Andy's Astronomy Page

About My Research

The underlying theme of my work is to determine how our Galaxy (the Milky Way) formed. This research has taken several directions:

Studying the motions, positions, and compositions of old stars in the Galaxy.
Studying nearby galaxies to see how they may relate to the Galaxy (Sagittarius and NGC 5206).
Studying the globular clusters (ancient, massive star clusters) of the Galaxy.
Developing the tools with which to make these studies possible, including measuring distances to RR Lyrae variable stars, and the amount of interstellar dust between us and the RR Lyrae stars.

Links to Publications, Data, and Active Projects

Refereed Publications including data tables (and preprints in publication).
Recent Conference Proceedings.
Compiled Observations of RR Lyrae Stars: photometry & radial velocities of field and cluster stars.
Work on deep HST images of WDs in M5.
Some data analysis programs users may wish to try.

Links to Related Work by Other People

Doug Welch's RR Lyrae database.
Bill Harris's catalogue of parameters for Milky Way Globular Clusters.
Christine Clement's catalogue of Variable Stars in Globular Clusters.
Bill Harris's catalog of Extra-Galactic Globular Clusters.
Jean-Marc Perelmuter's Globular Cluster Homepage

WIYN 0.9-m Telescope Scientist

Variable Stars 2004 Meeting (Saturday April 3 at BGSU)

Education Resources.

Some Fun, Nonprofessional Astronomy

Weighing Jupiter -- Computing the mass and mean density of Jupiter from simple observations of the Galillean moons.
How to observe orbiting satellites.
Meteor showers.
Fred Espenak's eclipse page contains excellent info on upcoming eclipses (both solar and lunar), past eclipses, and on how to observe eclipses.

Links to Out-of-the-Way Astro Utilities

Searchable access to the HST Guide Star Catalog -- returns positions and magnitudes of GSC stars within a given radius of given coordinates.
Super-Mongo graphics package, online manual and tutorial.