Here I have a brief description of my current research projects. Click on the figures to take you to the relevant publications!

Aperture Masking Interferometry on JWST

On board the James Webb Space Telescope is the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI), which is a thin piece of titanium metal with several holes cut out of it, sitting in the primary beam of the telescope. These holes cause interferometric fringes to form on the detector, which makes raw AMI data look very different to normal images (see top row of image below).

However, when it came to analysing AMI data, there was an unexpected complication: the infrared detector suffered from severe charge bleeding, which distorted the interferometric measurements. In his PhD, my colleague Dr. Louis Desdoigts developed amigo, a software designed to model and mitigate these detector effects (among other things) for AMI data. I have extended this by developing dorito, a software used to reconstruct images from AMI data (see bottom row of above image).

Watch our vodcast with Dr Karl about our AMI project!

Forward-Modelling Telescope Jitter

My first paper was an analysis of telescope vibration or jitter for the TOLIMAN Space Mission. I built a bunch of different jitter models for different types of telescope vibrations as pictured below!

This also included a Fisher Information analysis of the jitter models, to help understand how badly telescope jitter affected the science of the mission.