Reece Clark | Research

Skynet Global Observatory

Skynet 2 is a robotic telescope network that aims to provide access to optical and radio telescopes to students, professors, amateur astronomers, and researchers. Skynet currently boasts 19 optical telescopes and 1 radio, but Skynet 2 will have many, many more optical and radio telescopes.

My role, as a member of the Skynet 2 team, is to orchestrate the radio data processing pipeline that all radio observations will pass through. This pipeline will automatically handle any file from any radio telescope on the network.

Radio mega map of the galactic plane — Sources were identified and small manual WCS corrections were made using the Radio Source Finder tool in Astromancer. The images were then stitched together in Afterglow, an astronomy image processing interface.

I also created two tools on an educational astronomy suite named Astromancer. The first tool allows a student to compare their radio observations to their optical counterparts. The Crab Nebula, while stunning in optical, is no more than a blob point source when using the radio telescope. Nonetheless, the radio component carries important information concerning the physical phenomena at play. Ultimately, the tool guides students to showing there is more to the full picture than is easily seen with our eyes.

The second tool leads students through a robust pulsar analysis using a Lomb-Scargle periodogram. The students find the period of each spinning neutron star (which cannot be seen with an ordinary optical telescope!) and period fold their data to find a strongly periodic signal of the lighthouse-like star.

RIOS REU

In summer 2024, I participated in the Research Internships for Ocean Sciences (RIOS) Research Experience for undergraduates (REU) at Rutgers New Brunswick. I was mentored by professor Dr. Karen Bemis on analyzing and detecting hydrothermal plumes using a tank located at the University of New Hampshire (UNH).

My work was focused on creating 2D and 3D data visualizations that would best qualitatively assess hydrothermal plumes. This included: creating static 2D plots of slices of our data, animating across a range of slices, and making heat map averages of the plumes.

Hydrothermal plume diagnostic animation — These two animations are from an array of thermal emitting devices that create a "man-made hydrothermal vent". This array was used for diagnostic testing to ensure we were visualizing the plume correctly.

The end result of the project led to a GitHub repo with a lightweight software application for students to familiarize themselves with hydrothermal plume data and for researchers to quickly assess plumes while on research cruises.

ERIRA

I was a participant in the Educational Research in Radio Astronomy (ERIRA) program in 2023. This program gives students the opportunity to learn about radio astronomy in an intensive week long program. During the program I particpated in projects including:

• Astrophotography
• Mapping the Milky Way
• Sensing sunspots
• Recording Cas A

The Green Bank Telescope — A picture of the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) from afar.