Following up on last year’s summary of AstroWright lab science at AAS Long Beach, here are the exciting posters and talks you can expect from my group and collaborators at the National Harbor Meeting:
Monday:
- Poster #148.31: MINERVA: Small Telescopes, Small Planets. Updates on the (fully funded and already planet-detecting (sort of)) MINERVA array. This poster may also hang up at the PlaneWave booth on other days.
Tuesday:
- Talk #207.06 A Survey of the Hottest Jupiter Atmospheres via Secondary Eclipses. Ming Zhao updates on his work at Palomar, including the installation of a holographic diffuser in WIRC and custom detector calibration to perform precise NIR photometry from the ground.
Wednesday:
Poster #348.01 Improving the RV Precision of HET/HRS — The Tale of Two Iodine Atlases. Sharon Xuesong Wang uses augmented reality (download Layar to see it!), and presents the highest resolution optical echelle spectrum you will see at this meeting (or maybe ever!)
- Poster #349.01 A Mid-Infrared Search for Kardashev Civilizations. The punchline from our first paper (submitted) on this Templeton-funded SETI project.
- Talk #325.01 Remastering the RV Classics: Self-Consistent Dynamical Models for the 55 Cnc and GJ 876 Planetary Systems. Ben Nelson shows how to combine dynamical effects with large RV sets his work on two tricky dynamical systems, and fans of the “MCMC Hammer” will appreciate that he is including the results of his “RUN-DMC” algorithm.
Thursday:
- Poster #411.03. Limits on Stellar Companions to Exoplanet Host Stars With Eccentric Planets AstroWright collaborator Stephen Kane searches for the Kozai perturbers of eccentric planets. AstroWright lab member Katherina Feng contributed RV analysis, and bagged a planet!
Poster #441.09 Coronal heating of M dwarfs: The flare-energy distribution of fully convective stars Not really AstroWright lab science, but lab member Katherina (Ying) Feng presents her CfA REU work on flares on M dwarfs.
Poster #442.08 Rotation and activity at 3 Gyr with Ruprecht 147 Jason Curtis shows that Ca II H&K metrics are significantly and consistently stronger at 3 Gyr than at 5 Gyr for single, Sun-like stars. The dream of getting good ages for unevolved single stars gets a little closer…
Poster #442.06 Is Loden 1 an old and nearby star cluster? Or, “Is Ruprecht 147 Unqiue?” Eunkyu Han presents her investigation in to whether the purported cluster Lod�n 1 is real, really nearby, and/or really old.