Nicholas M. Law Projects Publications CV nlaw around astro.caltech.edu

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Welcome to my little piece of the web!

 

I'm a postdoc in Shri Kulkarni's group, at Caltech. I'm working on a variety of astronomical science and instrumentation projects.

P48 I'm the Project Scientist for the Palomar Transient Factory. Starting science observations in early 2009, PTF will conduct wide-field, high-cadence optical surveys of selected areas to detect variable object and transient candidates. It is a collaboration of over 40 people from Caltech, Columbia, Las Cumbres Observatory, LBL, Weizmann Institute, Berkeley & IPAC.
CAMERA CAMERA is a novel low-cost laser guide star adaptive optics system designed for small telescopes. You can find my SPIE 2008 talk describing the system and its science cases here. We've demonstrated closed loop AO operation in a very low-cost testbed system.
I'm the PI for LAMP, LuckyCam on the 200-inch Palomar telescope. Using a combination of Adaptive Optics (AO) and Lucky Imaging we achieved the highest-resolution-ever images taken with visible light from the ground or space.

My AAS2008 talk on our results is here - please email me if you would like the movie.

MAAPS, the M-dwarf Astrometric AO Planet Search, is a large Palomar adaptive-optics astrometry program I'm working on. The aim is to search for Jupiter-mass planets around mid-M-dwarfs.
I'm also working on target selection for the SIM PlanetQuest EPIcS planetfinding survey.
Lucky website Lucky website My PhD thesis research was on Lucky Imaging, the first system capable of reliably taking images with Hubble Space Telescope resolution from the ground using visible light and faint guide stars.

Here are some example 3 colour (BRz) composite wide field LuckyCam images.
CV Publication List

My publication list and CV

Last year, the BBC did an article and video about our LuckyCam science programmes.

Panoramic images One of the (many!) great things about astronomy is the opportunity to travel the world in the name of science.

These are some large panoramic photos I've taken on my travels, both astronomical and not.

Last updated Sep. 2006