Dr. Oisin Creaner – Assistant Professor in Physical Sciences, Dublin City University – “Funnels and buckets – how telescopes really work.”
Dr. Oisin Creaner
Dr Oisín Creaner is a computational astrophysicist and an Assistant Professor in Physical Sciences at Dublin City University. His primary research interests are the application of optimised software solutions to astronomical problems, particularly variable astronomical objects.
Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he developed readout and analytical software for Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors. Before that, he worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA as a NESAP for data postdoctoral fellow developing GPU simulations of the LZ dark matter detector. He has also worked as a lecturer in software development and data analytics at Technological University Dublin and National College of Ireland.
In addition, Oisín is currently the Communications Officer and ECR Rep on the Astronomical Society of Ireland, is the Treasurer of the Computational Physics group committee of the Institute of Physics and a member of the National Astronomy Education Coordinator team for Ireland with the International Astronomical Union.
Lecture
“Funnels and buckets – how telescopes really work.”
What’s a telescope for? What does it do? Most people’s instinctive response is to say “it magnifies images.” But for astronomy, magnification usually isn’t the main point of using a telescope. Instead, telescopes allow you to see fainter objects. Objects in the sky shower us with light all the time like rain. Telescopes act like a funnel: gathering rain from a large area to flow into a narrow opening like a drain. The lens or mirror of a telescope funnels light into your eye. Next, you can add a camera to the end of a telescope. This is like adding a bucket to the funnel, to keep gathering rain throughout the day. The camera can let light build up over its exposure time. In this talk, we’ll explain how telescopes work using easy-to-understand analogies.