Roy T. Smart#
I’m a PhD candidate in physics at Montana State University, advised by Charles Kankelborg. My research focuses on developing extreme ultraviolet snapshot imaging spectrographs for measuring the flow of plasma in the solar atmosphere. I was awarded a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship for my work on using machine learning to interpret observations from these spectrographs. Along the way I write open-source Python packages for modeling optical systems and analyzing solar data.
Sounding-rocket spectrographs that observe the Sun in ultraviolet light.
Open-source Python packages for optics, arrays, and solar data.
Papers and conference proceedings.
The solar transition region seen by ESIS during its 2019 flight. ESIS looks at the Sun through an octagonal field stop, and its grating spreads each bright spectral line into its own copy of the octagon: He I 58.4 nm and O V 63.0 nm, with faint Mg X between them. Three minutes of exposures, 10 s apart, play here at 20 times real speed.