Stars and galaxies are very faint and difficult to detect against the brightness of the night sky. In my lab we have developed a series of very sensitive sensors for stellar spectroscopy and direct photography. They are used on the Canada France Hawaii 3.6 m telescope, the telescopes at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory and our 0.4 m telescope atop the Geophysics and Astronomy building. One or more of our detectors will be used on Dr. Hickson's Liquid Mirror Telescope and I am already planning for their use on the 8-m Gemini telescopes.
In Gemini, Canada is collaborating with the USA, the UK and three South American countries to erect 8-m optical telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and at Cerro Pachon in Chile. They will provide sharper images of fainter sources than any other ground-based telescope. In Canada, I am the Project Scientist.
Stars are like musical instruments each with its own set of resonances. We have detected enormous ripples on the surfaces of a variety of stars hotter than the sun which we think correspond to giant sound waves trapped within them. By studying these we can probe the interior structure of the stars.
For twelve years we have carefully monitored the velocities of nearby Sun-like stars to look for the small reflex motions associated with any planets which may be orbiting them. We do this by passing the starlight through captive HF gas which imposes precise wavelength fiducials. Surprisingly, we have found no evidence of Jupiter-mass planets around any of 23 dwarf stars but we did find intriguing low amplitude velocity variations of all of the evolved stars we observed which seem to be due to variations in the stars themselves.