Astrochemistry

CARMA

The Combined Array for Research in Millimeter wave Astronomy (CARMA) array was one of the main workhorses for astrochemical observations, operating between 2009 and 2015. It was a heterogeneous array consisting of 15 elements (9 from the former BIMA array and 6 from the former OVRO array) located in the Inyo mountains (2200 m elevation) south-east of Bishop, CA. It had double sideband receivers at both 3mm (85-115 GHz) and 1mm (210-270 GHz) and systhensized beam resolutions of 10"-0.1" (depending on configuration and observing frequency). The frequency resolution ranges from 1500 MHz to 0.0305 MHz.

As a postdoctoral researcher for CARMA I conducted observations of high and low mass star forming regions, Herbig-Haro objects, and comets. I was also the on-site observer at the array many times and I am the local friend of the telescope at the University of Illinois. Additionally, my duties involved programming some of the array systems. My primary responsibility was to create the project database. This database is used to track and schedule all observations conducted by the array. It holds all observational information from every track. It is written in C++ and uses Berkeley DBXML as the main database engine. The database has a python user interface that connects to the database through a CORBA interface. My most recent project was working on the automated data reduction pipeline.