Work/Projects

operations, intrumental and astronomical research


Quick links to the projects I am involved in: GUIELOA, TORO, RATIR, SASIR, CalIm 
and formally ELPOA, IONIC, HiRes, etc.

 SCIENCE OPERATIONS

~80% of my time is now dedicated to science operations at VLT (mainly UT4 where  NACO and SINFONI are). More info will be added later on in this section.

INSTRUMENTATION PROJECTS

Before coming to ESO, I used to dedicate ~70% of my research time to instrumental/experimental work (mainly optics and adaptive optics  for high angular resolution applications), click here or on the sub-menu to find out more about my current and past instrumental work.
I intended to build better instruments for optical/IR ground based telescopes.  But how would one pretend to build good instruments never getting to use them (or the ones that exist and inspire the novel, improved, future, next generation others)? I will basically now spend this time on science operations though I will keep following a few projects here and there.

OBSERVATIONAL/ASTROPHYSICAL PROJECTS

As said before, I want to know as many observing techniques (in the optical/IR) as possible  to be able to build better instruments, having a more global vision on their needs and practical/technical issues. Therefore, I decided to dedicate ~15-20% of my research time to observational projects through collaborations with specialists.  I bring my instrumental knowledge to get the most out of a given instrument and hopefully achieve good/useful data. As a High Angular Resolution (HAR) instrument specialist, I plan to learn more Adaptive Optics (AO) observing and data reducing in the coming years to propose my specific services to observers who don't even think of using AO to constrain their favorite object(s). The second and third generation instruments for 8-10 meter class telescopes are often AO fed. AO will be very important for the future ELT instrumentation so it's time to learn!

Click here or on the sub-menu to find out more about my observational projects.

OTHER PROJECTS 


I am very much interested in communication technologies (e.g. internet) and therefore I get involved in diffusing information wether it'd be photos for my family or highly technical information to my project team. Going through the process of making this web page is part of that "game". It's  time consuming and I try not to spend more than ~3% of my time developping these tools.  As I want them to help the community, I had the idea of PAM, a wiki to strenghen the Mexican astronomy.

Public Outreach: I think that sciences and astronomy in particular aren't completly useless in the society. I am more and more interested in public outreach and therefore I will try to provide interesting informations and links hereby.