Intro

Science is a real adventure. I was fortunate and privileged to be directly involved in the exploration of nature and search for knowledge. An important aspect of science is to ask the right questions, or, in other words, to first identify the scientific problems. Once that work is done, the next step is to find answers. In observational astronomy, the answers are found through experiments and observations in the sky.

Work

PSF Retreat 2008, Kloster Maulbronn

In observational astronomical research, the scientist usually has two pos­si­bil­i­ties to find answers to astro-physical questions. She writes observation applications for in­stru­ments that already exist at telescopes or she accepts the efforts and designs and builds a new observation in­str­ument.

The process of building new optical in­stru­ments is usually organised in a project. The aim of the project is to derive requirements from the scientific questions, to translate them into specific designs and ultimately to build the optical instrument from them. Designs as well as instrument hardware and software are mainly developed within project phases in the fields of optics, opto-mechanics, cryo-mechanics, electronics, detectors, control software, data acquisition and data reduction.

This was my working environment, from working on a project to man­a­ging projects.

The scientific and technological return of my work is partially doc­u­men­ted through this list of publications.

In my professional life, I supported teaching exercises of MPIA PhD students to supervise Master students at Heidelberg University. For this purpose, I developed an optical experiment - task/experiment number F36 - for the Advanced Physics Lab for physicists at Heidelberg University. The experiment is located at MPIA and is currently supervised and further maintained by Markus Feldt.

Together with Andrei Tokovinin, I am the author of the online tutorial on adaptive optics (in German).

Work illustrated

La Silla 2010

For illustration and pleasure here are some pictures from my time at MPIA. From time to time the way to work offers a beautiful panorama.

Cool, the earth is a rocky planet, here are my proofs: a famous mountain in Argentina, a mountain " high light" in the German Allgäu, and for some Heidelberg people obligatory: the Heidelberg summit, a truly beautiful ascent.