Since coming to Hawaii in 2006 for my postdoc, I’ve spent most of my time working on the Variable Young Stellar Objects Survey (VYSOS) project.  The goal of this project is to build a suite of small telescopes to monitor star forming regions to look for a host of variable phenomena.  Of particular interest to me are accretion events which we see as a brightening of a star as material falls on to it.  These events have not been examined in a thorough, systematic manner over long periods of time for a large number of stars and the VYSOS project will fulfill that role.  I hope to examine these accretion events and study their relationship to protostellar outflows.  It is generally believed that outflows are triggered by accretion, so we should see a relationship between the frequency with which these accretion events occur and the structure of the outflows themselves.

My role so far has been in setting up the components of the VYSOS telescope suite.  A key element has been to design a wide field imaging system which has now been installed on Mauna Loa on the Big Island of Hawaii.  This system (now known as VYSOS-5) consists of a Stellarvue SV135 triplet refractor with an aperture of 135 mm working at f/5.4. When combined with a remarkable triplet field flattener and a large 16 megapixel CCD, this system yields a 2.9 degree field of view and allows us to image large star forming regions in a single shot, rather than tiling many images (see the North American Nebula image to the right).  The telescope sits in a small (6 foot diameter) dome and is controlled remotely from Hilo.

In addition, I have designed a larger, telescope system (VYSOS-20) which will soon join VYSOS-5 on Mauna Loa.  Once VYSOS-20 is operational, it will monitor specific star forming regions and young stars.  VYSOS-5 will then transition to a galactic plane survey in which it will image the plane of the Milky Way roughly once per week (roughly 8.5 degrees across the galactic equator and as much of galactic longitude as is available from Mauna Loa at that time).  This galactic plane survey will supplement the targeted survey of VYSOS-20 in that it will be unbiased by our expectations of where the interesting phenomena will be found.  By systematically imaging the entire galactic plane we will avoid the danger that we will only find what we look for.

We are also partnering with a group in Germany who are building a southern component to the project.  Two telescopes are being set up on Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama desert to monitor southern star forming regions.  In August 2008, I flew down to Chile to work on one of those telescopes.  You can read about that trip on my blog.