Astronomy & Physics
Research & Projects
I spent a research summer making our campus telescopes photograph the sky — CCD instrumentation, filters, and processing pipelines that made astrophotography something any student can do.
Problem
Ithaca College has real telescopes and CCD cameras, but astrophotography stayed out of reach for most students — the instrumentation and processing knowledge lived with a handful of people.
What I built
As a Summer Scholar with Prof. Matthew Price, I did computational astrophotography research: CCD imaging and instrumentation, telescope and filter work, and the data-processing workflows that turn raw sensor frames into usable images. The goal was a repeatable pipeline other students could pick up, not one-off pretty pictures.
Press
As featured in The Ithacan — Department of Physics and Astronomy makes astrophotography more accessible to students
Gallery
Outcome
The workflows from that summer fed into how the department runs astrophotography today, and the project was covered by the campus paper. I also served as Astronomy Club secretary, running outreach nights that put the same equipment in front of non-majors.