Brian McLeod
Astrophysicist
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
60 Garden St., MS 20
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 495-7023
Office: P-318
bmcleod at cfa dot harvard dot edu
Research Interests
Large telescopes:
I spend most of my time as part of a multi-national
team working on the design of the Giant
Magellan Telescope. The GMT will be one of a new generation of
extremely large telescopes, and will be located at Las Campanas,
Chile. The GMT will extend our view of the universe to much fainter
levels than we can currently see, and will also allow us to detect
small planets around nearby stars. I am leading the design of the
Active Optics, the parts of the telescope that keep the seven 8.4m
diameter primary mirror segments and seven 1m diameter secondary
mirror segments all properly aligned and with the correct figure.
Infrared instrumentation:
Before that I led the team that created the MMT and Magellan Infrared
spectrograph. MMIRS is
currently used at the MMT Observatory in sourthern Arizona. It
takes
images and spectra of the sky at wavelengths longer than we can
see with the human eye.
Optical instrumentation:
And before that I led the team that created
Megacam, a giant digital camera.
Megacam is used on the Clay Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert.
You can see some images taken by Megacam here.
Gravitational lensing:
On rare occasion I still have time to think about gravitational lensing, the bending of light by gravity.
If one massive object, like a galaxy, is lined up with another object, like a quasar, the gravity from the galaxy will create multiple magnified images of the background quasar. We can use those magnified images to learn about dark matter surrounding the galaxy, as well as learn about the quasar and its surroundings. For some images of gravitational lenses taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, check out the page of the CASTLES survey
Other Interests
Glass blowing:
When I'm not designing glass optics for telescopes I like to make colorful things out of glass.