It begins...

Seeing as the department webserver is down for now, and I have no useful way of tracking my academic thoughts at present, I may as well kick this off. The naming of this blog comes from what seems to be more of a hobby than my actual PhD research but here goes: I'm trying to make super high quality maps from deep infrared data taken from the Spitzer space telescope as part of the GOODS programme. These will hopefully be the highest quality maps produced from this set of data. And as well as that, I met some excellent folks at Santa Fe last year and we've begun setting up scientific tools and interface for the web version of GoogleSky: sort of a GoogleMap for astronomers. Tons of potential for growth in the future of these!

My PhD work, in stark contrast, is directed towards finding galaxy clusters in the Dark Energy Survey. Hmm.. this might take some explaining. Dark Energy is this "stuff" present in the universe that
(a) we can't see because it's made up of something weird,
(b) we can't find because we can't see it,
(c) but know it's all over the place and blowing the universe apart.
Intriguing, no? So in the infinite wisdom of a bunch of cosmology geeks, the Dark Energy Survey (or DES) was set up to solve problems (a) and (b). Or at least get a better answer than shrugging our shoulders and mumbling something about scalar fields, maybe. I'll indulge with how I fit in further on down the line... I do stuff faaaarr less exciting!

So, for building maps of the sky, searching the heavens, and hunting for clusters buried in the quintessence of the universe; cosmic cartography begins thus.