Graduate student Liuyi Pei’s paper on observations of the AGN KA1858+4850 was accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper describes a 10-month monitoring campaign carried out at the Lick 3-meter telescope and other observatories to determine the black hole mass in one of the brightest AGNs that was monitored by the Kepler mission. A preprint is now posted on the arXiv.
Category Archives: News
Saying goodbye to the UCI Observatory
The UCI Observatory is being demolished this summer because its location is being developed for new UCI campus housing. The observatory has served us well for many years (longer than the 10 years that I’ve been at UCI) and was used for public viewing nights, undergraduate classes, and summer high-school science programs. Because of the bright city lights in Orange County, this location isn’t suitable for research-quality observations, even with our 24-inch telescope, but it’s been great to have the observatory just a short walk from the center of campus. Our plan is to build a new observatory with better equipment and a nicer building in a park that will be close to the old observatory location.
POTUS @ UCI graduation
Barack Obama was the guest speaker at UCI’s graduation ceremony on June 14 at Angel Stadium in Anaheim. Here’s the view from where I was sitting at the back of the faculty section in the outfield, with the president on the jumbotron.
Op-ed piece about Lick Observatory
Along with Alex Filippenko and Claire Max , I co-authored an opinion piece which ran in the San Jose Mercury News on January 3 regarding the funding situation for UC’s Lick Observatory.