Phone: 856-256-4391
Fax: 856-256-4478
My schedule
Hail, Well Met, and Welcome to my home page! As implied above, I am a professor of astronomy in the Department of Physics and Astronmy at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. I generally teach introductory mechanics with a smattering of specialized courses for pre- and in-service science teachers (physics, space science, and earth science) and the occasional meteorology course. I am also continuing the research begun when I was a Research Associate with the Astronomy Department at Cornell University working with Dr. James F. Bell III. My research centers around analyzing multi-spectral images of Mars in order to understand the spatial distribution and extent of water and CO2 ices and their diurnal and seasonal variations.
I finished up my Ph.D. in Physics (with the Astronomy concentration) on 19 June 1997 from the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Wyoming. The title of my dissertation is Infrared Imaging Spectroscopy of Martian Volatiles and is available here online or through University Microfilms. You can also find the PCA/LMM source code I am using in this work.
If you don't know what multi-spectral imaging or PCA/LMM are, or you do and are dying to find out more, you can check out my 1995 or 1996 presentations to the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society.
I have also been busy continuing a near-infrared monitoring project of Mars in collaboration with Jim Bell. This has involoved several trips to the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. All of these recent images have now gone through their initial reduction phase and I have put together a page of some of the prelimiary 1999 images. I have also recently taken over the duties of maintaining a web site for the International Mars Watch, an organization of professional and amateur astronomers dedicated to sharing thier images with each other, and the public, in order to help advance the state of understanding of Mars and provide information on the changing nature of Mars.
For those wanting more information about me, check out my CV. Or you can gain some more insight to my personality by cruising through the many and varied links over there in that frame on your right. I've tried to break them down by major catagory (and even sub-catagories). Each link there will open a new page in this frame with all the links in that particular catagory. Note that all external links will open up at the top level rather than leaving you stranded in the middle of my frames. I find that option to be the least annoying. I found it much more efficient to stick my links on separate pages rather than one huge page. That and it gave me some HTML Frames programming experience.