Greetings

I'm a fourth year astrophysics graduate student at Caltech working with Prof. Shrinivas Kulkarni on precision astrometry with adaptive optics and magnetars. We are currently measuring the proper motions of magnetars in the near-IR with the NIRC2 instrument at the 10-meter Keck telescopes. We achieve a proper motion precision of <0.3 mas/yr over a baseline of five years.

I'm also currently working on the Robo-AO project led by Dr. Christoph Baranec. We have developed an inexpensive robotic AO system for 1-2 m class telescopes with a laser guide star facility. It is designed to work with very high efficiency in moving from target to target and will be an excellent tool for imaging surveys with small telescopes. We currently achieve an overhead time of less than a minute as compared to 5-15 minutes at AO systems on larger telescopes. With this, we have been able to observe between 140-150 targets each night this summer from the Palomar Observatory 60-inch telescope.