Background
I work in the field of astronomical instrumentation at optical and infrared wavelengths. A particular emphasis has been high-angular resolution imaging, especially interferometric aperture synthesis and adaptive optics, but more recently I have worked on projects related to spectroscopy, with an emphasis on high stability and precision.
Publications
A list of publications can be found here but is not always kept up-to-date. An alternative is to look on Google Scholar and ADS.
Current Projects
This is a work in progress, details are to be filled out as time permits…
MROI
Much of my research over the last decade has been dedicated to the design and construction of the Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI), a project to build the world’s most ambitious optical array. MROI will be able to image targets 10 times fainter than those accessible with any other interferometer, and it will be able to make images on timescales of hours instead of days (Buscher et al 2013).
Manufacturing metre-sized gratings with nanometre precision
The E-ELT HIRES spectrograph
The MOONS spectrograph for VLT
Past projects
COAST (1999-2003)
ELECTRA and MARTINI (1994-1999)
Sparse aperture masking (1987-1995)
NPOI (1990-1994)
The Mark III interferometer (1990-1993)
COAST (1985-1989)
Notable results
My scientific contributions include a number of significant firsts:
- making the first reliable image of surface features on any star apart from the Sun (Buscher 1990);
- developing the first image reconstruction software to adapt radio interferometric technologies to the noise model of optical measurements (Buscher 1993), a model now adopted by all image reconstruction packages in this field;
- making the first direct measurements of the outer scale of the optical turbulence which limits the performance of imaging systems (Buscher 1995).