This year brought us closer to the first light of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. At UW, our team continues to work on algorithms and software, preparing to make discoveries with this great observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time — the LSST.
Doug Branton is a Software Engineer for the LINCC project located at the University of Washington. Doug completed his undergraduate studies in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Washington, and afterwards worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute for five years, where he supported the Hubble Space Telescope as a member of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) team.
At DiRAC, we work to understand the universe through data-intensive discovery. We build the world’s most advanced sky surveys, algorithms, and software to explore and understand the Universe. Over the next decade, our researchers and students will scan the sky for hazardous asteroids, discover interstellar comets, and search for new planets in our Solar System.
Some rare asteroids are only visible to telescopes during the few short hours during morning and evening twilight, making them notoriously difficult to discover. In her leadership role within the LSST’s Solar System Science Collaboration, Sarah Greenstreet has led recent efforts to ensure that LSST uses a portion of the survey to search the twilight near-Sun sky for these elusive asteroids.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) Ellipsoid is a geometric method for prioritizing technosignature observations based on the strategy of receiving signals synchronized to conspicuous astronomical events. Precise distances to nearby stars from Gaia makes constraining Ellipsoid crossing times possible.
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Our work — from outreach, education, to fundamental research — is made possible in no small part by contributions from supporters like you. Thank you for all of your past support; it has truly made a difference. As you consider your charitable donations this year, I hope you will consider
supporting the work at DiRAC — enabling our students and postdocs to engage in the next generation of discovery!
