Spectral Analysis

In the spring of 2019, I was part of a research team in the Wellesley Astronomy department dedicated to designing and building a working spectrometer to attach to the new Planewave CDK700 telescope being installed at the Whitin Observatory that year.

My primary role in the design process was working with team member Clara Berger to design and implement the software that researchers would use to interpret the data taken by the spectrometer once it was attached to the telescope. Although astronomers have been plotting spectrographic results with computers for decades, the existing software was in IRAF, which is an astronomy-specific language that's less than approachable for novice programmers. Clara and I wanted an interface that would be more approachable for introductory to intermediate astronomy students, so we avoided both IRAF and pyRAF (the python interface for IRAF) and derived the needed functionality independently using Python in a Jupyter notebook to maximize accessibility.

The final product was a tool for use with Wellesley's new spectrometer, not a general spectrometer data analysis package, but it could be modified slightly to work with other instruments. It made use of the Python libraries numpy, scipy, astropy, specutils, and matplotlib. The team used images from a previous spectrometer on the Wellesley Sawyer 24-inch reflector as test cases.

The final report for the project is here.