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What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am currently a third year graduate student at Stanford leading analysis on the DESI LOWZ Secondary Target Survey.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I was raised in Marin County in California and am currently living in Palo Alto.

What do you do as part of DESI?
I mainly work on analysis for the LOWZ survey. I am interested in understanding the properties and histories of nearby low redshift dwarf galaxies. I have worked on the survey since its conception, through the process of target selection, and am now heading the analysis of the SV3 and early main survey data. I am interested in how nearby dwarf galaxies can help us understand the formation histories of dwarf galaxies within the Milky Way.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
I enjoy the problem solving aspect of computational astrophysics. I like the process of going from a project’s conception to understanding how to efficiently implement the analysis in code. I also like the intimacy of low redshift analysis where I can come to know the objects I work with as individuals. Lastly, I have always deeply valued the social aspects of science. Getting to collaborate and just hang out with my colleagues at all career stages is always a daily highpoint.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Have fun! As a scientist, it is easy to get caught up in the stress about your performance, knowledge, or career advancement. While these aspects all matter, they can easily overshadow the reasons one gets in to science in the first place – a desire for knowledge and curiosity about the world. Remember to take time to reflect on how awesome the work you are doing is. Contributing to the project of human exploration is valuable, even if you are just an elementary school student working on your first science experiment. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you are not good enough, and strive to find people who remind you why you love science rather than make you feel like you don’t belong.

What do you do for fun?
For fun I enjoy cooking, writing, and drawing. I also love hanging out with close friends over good food and good wine surrounded by interesting conversations. I am an avid consumer of podcasts and leftist YouTube channels and love learning about topics outside of astrophysics from literature to history. I am currently supplementing my graduate school course load with an excellent course on Victorian poetry. Before COVID, I also enjoyed going out to see live theater in the Bay Area.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
Executive Coordinator for NSF’s NOIRLab Mid-Scale Observatories / Kitt Peak Directors office.

Where were you born?
Florida

Where do you live now?
Tucson, Arizona

What do you do as part of DESI?
I provide administrative support including planning of DESI reviews and collaboration meetings, logistics, lodging and safety support along with procuring miscellaneous supplies as needed for the Kitt Peak DESI team.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
The most interesting thing is interacting with people of all cultures, backgrounds and skill sets. I feel very honored and privileged to be able to work on the beautiful, magical Tohono O’odham land.

What do you do for fun?
I enjoy remote camping and exploring the deserts and forests of Arizona with my husband and three (adult!) kids.

Victoria Fawcett, Durham University

July 22, 2021

As the main DESI survey gets truly underway, I want to reflect on the amazing quality of the DESI quasar spectra observed so far. Quasars are incredibly luminous types of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), which consist of a supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxies, surrounded by a disc of matter that often outshines the entire galaxy. Quasars are one of the brightest objects in the Universe and are really important in all areas of Astronomy, especially Cosmology.

With over 30,000 quasar spectra observed so far, DESI is already pushing beyond what previous spectroscopic surveys have achieved. The image shows these ~30,000 spectra stacked in different bins of redshift, with the lowest redshift bin (z<0.4) corresponding to the objects closest to us. The dashed lines indicate the main emission lines in the spectra, each of which provide important information about the nature of the object: for example, the Oxygen lines can be used to study outflows close to the supermassive black hole. The clarity of the spectra and different lines really highlights the amazing quality of the data – the two red dotted lines show galaxy absorption lines, so we can even clearly see the affect of the surrounding galaxy!

Other exotic objects such as Broad Absorption Line Quasars (BALQSOs), systems known to host powerful outflows, have also been found within DESI (see image below). The dips to the left of the CIV, SiIV and Lya line are called BAL “troughs”, which deepen with increasing “balnicity index (BI)”; a measure of the strength of the trough. Studying these systems may be really important for understanding the processes that connect AGNs and their host galaxies.

DESI also pushes to fainter and more obscured systems which have been difficult to observe with shallower spectroscopic surveys. Quasars enshrouded by dust (“red quasars”) may represent an important phase in galaxy evolution so understanding their properties is crucial – these are the objects I am most interested in!

With millions of more quasar spectra to come, the future of quasar physics looks bright. I personally look forward to analysing the data and exploring all the weird and wonderful objects DESI has to offer.

David Schlegel, DESI Project Scientist

July 22, 2021

Only eight weeks into DESI’s five-year mission, a 3-dimensional map of the universe is starting to take shape.

Plotted below is a “pie diagram” slice through the universe, with earth in the lower left, looking out in the directions of the constellations Virgo, Serpens and Hercules to distances beyond 5 billion light years. As this video progresses, the vantage point sweeps through 20 degrees towards Bootes and Corona Borealis. Each point represents a DESI target. The nearest are the bright galaxy sample (BGS as white points), then the luminous red galaxies (LRGs in red), emission line galaxies (ELGs in green), and finally quasi-stellar objects (QSOs in blue). Each of these targets is composed of 100 billion to 1 trillion stars, although we plot each target only as a single point. Gravity has clustered the galaxies into structures called the “cosmic web”, with dense clusters, filaments and voids.

DESI shuts down today for summer maintenance and upgrades, timed to coincide with the monsoon season in Arizona. When observations re-start in September, five times more galaxies will be observed at each sky location, gaps in this map will be filled in, and the area surveyed will eventually grow to span most of the sky visible from the northern hemisphere.

Ignasi Pérez i Ràfols

Santiago Serrano Elorduy

Andrea Muñoz Gutiérrez

Alma Xochitl Gonzalez Morales

Charles-Antoine Claveau

Christopher Manser

Richard Joyce

Tami Blackwell

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a third year PhD student at Durham University, working on red quasars within the Galaxy Quasar Physics working group. Quasars are high redshift objects that tend to be very blue, but there is a small but important subset that show much redder colours (“red quasars”). Our group at Durham are very interested in these red quasars because we have found fundamental differences in the radio properties of red quasars, compared to their blue counterparts. We are excited to explore reddened quasars within DESI.

Where were you born?
I was born in Yorkshire in the UK, but grew up down South in in Berkshire so never got the accent!

Where do you live now?
I now live in Durham UK, close to the University. Durham is a beautiful city and I love walking by the river.

What do you as part of DESI?
Within DESI I am studying the diversity of quasars and in particular dust-reddened quasars. I have a secondary target program that has been targeting reddened quasars that may have otherwise been missed by the nominal QSO selection. I am also a member of the ECS committee within DESI. The ECS committee organises monthly ECS meetings and plans pre-meeting ECS activities such as networking events and data tutorials.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about DESI ?
I love being connected to people within the collaboration from all over the world. I have already learnt so much from being part of DESI and have met so many interesting people. In my work I enjoy exploring new datasets, trying to make connections and understanding new results. I particularly enjoy looking at different exotic quasar systems that DESI has been observing such as broad absorption line quasars and reddened quasars.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Never give up and never think you are not good enough. Sometimes you might wonder whether there is an easier path than academia, but ask yourself if there is anything as enjoyable as exploring the Universe!

What do you do for fun?
I like going to the pub with my friends—and Durham is not short on great pubs! I also enjoy giving public science talks and going to music festivals.

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team is pleased to announce the public release of the Siena Galaxy Atlas 2020 (SGA-2020), a value-added supplemental catalog to imaging Data Release 9 (DR9).

The SGA-2020 is a multiwavelength atlas of 383,620 nearby galaxies selected over the 20,000 square-degree imaging footprint based on their (large) apparent angular diameter. It has been used in Survey Validation and the Main Survey to improve the selection of BGS targets, for improved masking of faint, dark-time (ELG, LRG, QSO) targets, in secondary target programs (e.g., to facilitate studies of the peculiar velocity field in the local volume via the Tully-Fisher and Faber-Jackson relations), and more. Read more about the SGA-2020 on the AAS poster.

For each galaxy in the SGA, we carry out the following measurements:

We generate custom grz and W1W2 image stacks using all the available imaging (upper-left panel);
We use The Tractor, in the context of the legacypipe photometric pipeline to build a model of all the sources in the field (middle-left panel);
We subtract all the sources in the field except the object of interest from the data and measure the surface-brightness profile using nested, fixed-geometry elliptical isophotes (bottom-left panel).

This procedure yields the non-parametric grzsurface-brightness profiles, g-r and r-z color-radius profiles, and grz curves of growth shown in the right-hand panels of the figure above, and more.

Documentation of the SGA-2020 can be found here. A queryable web-application is also available here.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a graduate student at the Ohio State University working with Klaus Honscheid and Ashley Ross. I have primarily focused on DESI’s fiber positioner robots which I have a long history with stretching back to my time as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I was born in Pontiac, Michigan on the north side of Metro Detroit. A fun fact is that the car company Pontiac (now defunct) is named after the city which in turn was named after Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawa people. I now live in Columbus, Ohio.

What do you do as part of DESI?
I have been working with DESI’s fiber positioner robots since 2016. My work has been a good mix of writing software, running hardware, and thinking a lot about how the robots move, including calibration and individual quirks. When I moved to Ohio State the scale of my work grew and I developed the software interface between the Instrument Control System and the Focal Plane System. Through the commissioning campaign I was hard at work with the rest of the focal plane team in operating the focal plane, addressing operational quirks, and improving the operational efficiency when using the focal plane.

Most recently I have become interested in the creation of the clustering catalogues from DESI data. DESI views the universe in its own unique way, creating a characteristic fingerprint in its data. When trying to extract cosmological information from DESI’s observations it is important to understand and take out effects that arise from DESI’s hardware and observing strategy. This way we can make conclusions on the underlying universe rather than just what DESI saw.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
It is exciting to work on such an amazing instrument. DESI’s 5,000 positioner robots are a complex system to work with but they enable us to map galaxies on a scale never done before. Another great feature of DESI is that its size requires a large collaboration of vibrant people to learn from and interact with!

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
I am still a young scientist myself but learning to ask questions is a skill that I am still developing and wish I had developed earlier. There should be no shame in not knowing something. Also asking a question can dramatically increase the value of reading a paper or listening to a talk.

What do you do for fun?
When I get the time, I love to go hiking; both on day hikes and multi-day hikes. When I do not have time, I go for walks instead. More often though I spend my time reading, enjoying some music, or experimenting in the kitchen.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a PhD student working with my supervisor Lado Samushia from Kansas state university mainly involved in Galaxy & quasar clustering working group.

Where were you born and where do you live now?
I was born in Beijing, spent my college time at Nanjing and now live in Manhattan, Kansas. Of course I feel most at home in Beijing but I am getting used to life in this peaceful and friendly small town in the Midwest.

What are the interesting places that standout that your work has taken you to?
Before starting graduate school, I got a chance to travel to Canary island, which is in the Atlantic Ocean, for a cosmology summer school. The night there is so dark and mysterious. I grew up in a big city and I have never seen such a clear but starry sky. I am looking forward to visiting Kitt Peak through a DESI related trip someday.

What would you say is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
As a DESI member, I have the opportunity to work with top groups from all over the world and it’s really exciting to see effort from collaboration members pushing the project forward. Personally, I enjoy extracting physics information for huge datasets. There are different ways to analyze DESI data and you can always find something new. It is interesting to gradually unveil the mystery of the universe.

Any advice for aspiring scientists?
Find your research interest, keep moving forward and learn coding.

Finally, what do you do for fun?
I used to play piano but I don’t have one here. I do photography, hiking and gaming. Dota2 will be a good topic but not League of Legends.

¿Cuál es tu posición en el proyecto DESI?
Soy estudiante de doctorado, trabajando con mi supervisor Lado Samushia, de la Universidad Estatal de Kansas, me involucro principalmente en el grupo de trabajo de aglomeración de galaxias y cuásares.

¿Dónde naciste y dónde vives ahora?
Nací en Beijing, viví durante la licenciatura en Nanjing, y ahora vivo en Manhattan, Kansas. Por supuesto que donde me siento más en casa es en Beijing, pero me estoy acostumbrando a la vida en este pacífico y amistoso pueblito del medio-oeste.

¿Cuáles son los lugares interesantes más destacados a donde te ha llevado tu trabajo?
Antes de empezar el posgrado tuve oportunidad de viajar a las Islas Canarias, en el Océano Atlántico, para una escuela de verano de cosmología. La noche ahí es tan oscura y misteriosa. Crecí en una ciudad grande y nunca había visto un cielo tan claro y estrellado. Estoy muy emocionada por visitar Kitt Peak en un viaje relacionado con DESI algún día.

¿Qué dirías que es lo más interesante y emocionante de tu trabajo?
Como miembro de DESI, tengo la oportunidad de trabajar con grupos de todo el mundo y es muy emocionante ver el esfuerzo de los miembros de la colaboración llevando al proyecto hacia adelante. Personalmente, disfruto extrayendo la física de grandes conjuntos de datos. Hay diferentes maneras de analizar los datos de DESI y siempre se encuentra algo nuevo, Es interesante develar poco a poco los misterios del Universo.

¿Algún consejo para aspirantes a científicos?
Encuentra tus intereses en la investigación, sigue adelante y aprende a escribir código.

Finalmente, ¿Qué haces para divertirte?
Solía tocar el piano, pero no tengo uno aquí. Hago fotografía y excursionismo. Me gustan los videojuegos, “Dota2” es un buen tema pero no “League of Legends”.

¿Cuál es tu rol en el proyecto DESI?
Soy postdoc, y estoy involucrado principalmente en el grupo de trabajo de agrupamientos de galaxias y cuásares (Galaxy and Quasar Clustering, GQC).

¿Dónde naciste y dónde vives ahora?
Nací en Seúl, Corea. Actualmente vivo en Shanghai, China, donde tengo una posición postdoctoral en SJTU ( Universidad Jiao Tong).

¿Qué dirías que es lo más interesante o emocionante de tu trabajo?
Para mi, una de las cosas más interesantes de DESI es la experiencia en el procesamiento de datos espectroscópicos. Antes de unirme a DESI, para mi los “datos” eran simplemente un conjunto de archivos en formato binario, que consistían en muchas columnas que incluyen la ascensión recta, declinación, desplazamiento al rojo y algunos pesos. Ahora, estando en DESI, he tenido muchas oportunidades de aprender como los datos crudos son procesados en los flujos de análisis que producen los archivos que antes solo llegaban a mis manos. Por ejemplo, participando en la inspección visual de espectros, y trabajando con el código de asignación de fibras.

¿Algún consejo para aspirantes a científicos?
Tanto los éxitos como los fracasos, pueden ser escalones para dar el siguiente paso.

Finalmente, ¿Qué haces para divertirte?
Leo libros. Prefiero leerlos lentamente y disfrutar cada línea, que leerlos rápido, lo que me hace sentir que estoy teniendo una conversación con el autor. Recientemente ( no sabría decir si debido a, ó gracias a, la COVID19, pero da igual) inicié un par de clubs de lectura en línea, con algunos viejos amigos. Después de leer un capítulo del mismo libro, cada una o dos semanas, nos reunimos en línea y discutimos sobre cualquier cosa relacionada con el capítulo. Quizá quieras intentarlo, ¡es realmente divertido!

What is your role in the DESI project?
I’m a post-doc mainly involved in GQC working group.

Where were you born? Where do you live now?
I was born in Seoul, Korea and currently living in Shanghai, China for my post-doc position at SJTU.

What would you say is the most interesting or exciting thing about DESI?
One of the most interesting thing about DESI for me is to experience the pipeline for processing spectroscopic data. Before joining DESI, ‘data’ were just some binary files to me consisting of many columns including RA, DEC, z, and some weights. But, after joining DESI, I had many chances to learn about how raw data are processed in the pipelines before arriving at my hands. For example, participating in visual inspection and working on fiber assignment are the ones where I can experience some part of the raw data process.

Any advice for aspiring scientists?
Either failure or success, it can be a stepping stone for the next step.

Finally, what do you do for fun?
Reading books. Rather than reading fast, I prefer slow reading and enjoying each line, which makes me feel like having conversation with author. And, recently, (I’m not sure if I should say “because of“ or “thanks to” COVID19, but anyway) I started a couple of online book clubs with some old friends. After reading one chapter of the same book every week or every two weeks, we regularly meet online and discuss anything related to the chapter. You may want to try this as well. It is really fun!

Aaron Meisner, NOIRLab

November 17, 2020

It’s remarkable to think that our DESI Legacy Surveys team completed on order a thousand nights of ground-based observing from Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo. All the while in low-Earth orbit, NASA’s WISE satellite has been steadily and reliably amassing nearly a decade of full-sky data at infrared wavelengths of 3-5 microns. WISE continuously obtains a new pair of degree-sized images every ~10 seconds, observing around the clock.

Selection of DESI’s luminous red galaxy and quasar targets requires not only optical data from telescopes like the Mayall and Blanco, but also infrared fluxes from WISE. It’s therefore crucial that DESI target selection make full use of the entire WISE data set. Once each year, we download millions of recently acquired raw WISE images to NERSC and use these to update DESI’s custom, coadded WISE maps. As of DR9, the raw WISE data set assembled at NERSC has grown to a quarter petabyte in size! Each year, upon completion of our latest WISE map-making efforts, we can once again declare that DESI has created the deepest ever full-sky maps and catalogs at mid-infrared wavelengths. DR9 incorporates seven years of WISE observations, versus five years for DR8 and just one year for DR1.

WISE has scanned the entire sky more than a dozen times, lending a strong time-domain component to the Legacy Surveys data products. Our Legacy Surveys WISE light curves for ~2 billion sources represent a totally unprecedented and as-yet little explored data set. Mining DR9’s infrared data products, especially in combination with optical Legacy Surveys photometry and DESI spectroscopy, will provide a diverse array of scientific opportunities throughout the coming years.

Light echoes from a Milky Way supernova, as seen in the time-domain ‘unWISE’ coadds of Legacy Surveys DR9. These custom WISE coadds also enable DESI’s selection of faint variable quasar candidates.

The Kitt Peak National Observatory, where the Mayall telescope houses the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, was closed in March, 2020 due to the global coronavirus pandemic. The observatory cautiously and carefully reopened for maintenance in September, 2020 and since then has been slowly ramping up activities. Critical telescope maintenance and instrument improvements are being made in anticipation of a re-commissioning phase of DESI in November. Following this re-commissioning period, during which we will confirm that the instrument provides the same performance as it did pre-shutdown, we will start our Survey Validation phase. The team is excited and eager to once again start collecting data!

Matt Evatt and Patrick Dunlop practicing social distancing while preparing the Mayall telescope for on-sky DESI operations.

Adam Myers, University of Wyoming

November 4, 2020

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument will conduct spectroscopy of truly vast numbers of cosmological and astrophysical sources. These include Bright Galaxies, Emission Line Galaxies (ELGs), Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs), Quasars, and objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy. DESI spectra are obtained by aligning optical fibers with locations on the sky, to collect light to be analyzed by dedicated spectrographs. But, how do DESI scientists know where to place those optical fibers in the first place?

Sources for the DESI key projects are targeted using images of the sky from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. The Legacy Surveys include optical photometry from dedicated campaigns with the Mayall and Bok telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, and the Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory near La Serena in Chile. The Legacy Surveys also incorporate infrared imaging from the WISE and NEOWISE missions, and source detections from the Gaia survey.

When envisioning the process of finding distinct objects in the sky, it is tempting to picture a bright, extended galaxy, such as this one:

Image from the Legacy Survey Viewer, using data from DR8 at right ascension of ~217.6 deg. and declination of ~11.9. See original here. credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)

But, in truth, the vast majority of DESI targets are far less spectacular to the eye, and are selected based on properties such as their color in addition to their shape. Below is the same image from the Legacy Survey Viewer above with the targets identified with circles. You’ll see that there are many more DESI targets in this field than you might have naively expected!

Same image as above from the Legacy Survey Viewer with the targets identified. You can do this yourself by selecting “DESI Targets” in the Legacy Survey Viewer menu. credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)

To determine which of the one-and-a-half-billion or so sources in the Legacy Surveys will be the lucky few tens-of-millions targeted by DESI requires sophisticated computer algorithms to sift through sources and target objects with specific photometric properties. The publicly available software that DESI uses, which is called desitarget, comprises tens-of-thousands of lines of code and has received contributions from dozens of DESI scientists.

The DESI collaboration recently released a series of research notes detailing the currently expected targeting algorithms for the DESI five-year survey:

Bright Galaxies (Ruiz-Macias et al.)
Luminous Red Galaxies (Zhou et al.)
Emission Line Galaxies (Raichoor et al.)
Quasars (Yèche et al.)
Milky Way Sources (Allende Prieto et al.)

The target catalogs that correspond to these notes, which are drawn from Data Release 8 of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, are publicly available here in a format described here.

Although it is a significant milestone to have the first official DESI target catalogs in-hand, the dedicated effort of the collaboration continues. The next data release of the Legacy Surveys (Data Release 9) will soon be used to optimize, refine and finalize the target catalogs for the DESI five-year survey, during a phase of the project known as Survey Validation.

¿Cuál es tu posición o rol en el proyecto DESI?
Soy estudiante de doctorado y contribuyo principalmente a los grupos de trabajo de selección de objetivos y Física de cuásares y galaxias.

¿Dónde naciste y dónde vives actualmente?
Nací en un pueblito en el noreste de la India, llamado Agartala. Después de hacer mis estudios de pregrado en Bhubaneswar, India, me mudé a Pittsburgh, EUA, donde estoy haciendo mis estudios de posgrado en la Universidad de Pittsburgh.

¿Qué haces como parte de DESI?
Trabajo principalmente en el desarrollo y prueba de algoritmos para seleccionar los objetos de los que DESI va a medir espectros usando datos de los sondeos de imagen. Después de las observaciones, hago una revisión de los espectros para confirmar que los datos satisfacen los requisitos científicos. También trabajo estudiando la física de galaxias, y quiero estudiar la evolución de las poblaciones galácticas. También he observado con el instrumento y he ayudado al desarrollo de la infraestructura del censo.

¿Qué es lo más interesante o emocionante de DESI (y/o tu trabajo y/o la Astronomía en general)?
La astronomía es la forma más antigua de ciencia observacional, pero aún sabemos muy poco sobre nuestro universo. ¡Aún no sabemos de qué está hecho el 95% del universo! Siendo parte de DESI puedo trabajar con muchas personas maravillosas que intentan responder algunas de las preguntas más básicas y profundas sobre el Universo, como: ¿cuándo y por qué empezó todo? ¿qué es lo que causa la expansión del Universo? Esta exploración de lo desconocido es lo que más me emociona.

¿Algún consejo para alguien que aspire a ser científico?
Sé curioso, haz preguntas e intenta explorar todos los recursos disponibles para responderte tú mismo. A veces encontrarás las respuestas, a veces no, pero en el proceso llegarás a entender el método científico de dar seguimiento a un problema. Aún si no acabas siendo un científico profesional, creo que aprender el método científico para resolver cualquier problema de la vida es muy importante.

¿Qué haces para divertirte/en tus tiempos libres?
Amo explorar diferentes gastronomías y recrearlas por mí mismo. Amo las caminatas y explorar nuevos lugares. También me gusta mucho hablar con otras personas sobre ciencia y ayudar a organizar eventos de divulgación científica en la ciudad.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am a PhD student working mainly as a part of the Target Selection and Galaxy and Quasar Physics Working Groups.

Where were you born and where do you live now?
I was born in a small town in North Eastern India called Agartala. After doing by undergraduate studies in Bhubaneswar, India, I moved to Pittsburgh, USA where I am currently doing my grad school at the University of Pittsburgh.

What do you do as part of DESI?
I mostly work on developing and testing algorithms to select objects of which DESI will measure the spectra using the data from the imaging surveys. After the observations, I also go through the spectra to check whether the data satisfies all the science requirements. I also work on studying the physics of galaxies and want to study how populations of galaxies evolve. I have also done some observations with the instrument and help in developing some of the infrastructure for the survey.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about DESI?
Astronomy is the oldest form of observational science but we still know so little about our universe. We are still in the dark about what 95% of the universe is made of! By being a part of DESI, I get to work with a lot of wonderful people who are trying to answer some of the most basic and profound questions about our Universe like, When and Why did everything begin? or What is causing the expansion of the Universe? This exploration of the unknown is what excites me the most.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Be curious, ask questions and try explore all the resources available to find the answers yourself. Sometimes you will find an answer, sometimes you won’t but in the process you will get to understand the scientific method of tackling a problem. Even if you don’t end up being a professional scientist, I believe learning the scientific method to solve any problem in our life is very important.

What do you do for fun?
I love exploring different cuisines and and recreate them on my own. I love to go out on hikes and explore new places. I also like to talk to others about science and help organize science outreach events in the city.

¿Cuál es tu rol en DESI?
Soy investigador en el LLNL (Laboratorio Nacional Lawrence Livermore) y trabajo en el equipo de operaciones de DESI.

¿Dónde naciste?
Nací en St. Louis, Missouri.

¿Dónde vives ahora?
Vivo en San Leandro, California, justo al sur de Oakland.

¿Qué actividades realizas en DESI?
Recientemente me he enfocado en comprobar la precisión del posicionamiento de las fibras, y finalizar el sondeo de imágenes. También trabajo en la programación de observación del telescopio. Mi trabajo se relaciona completamente con software, así que en el día a día escribo código y hago gráficas. Finalmente, pienso mucho en cómo los errores sistemáticos en los sondeos de imágenes pueden imprimirse en los mapas que haremos con DESI.

¿Qué dirías que es lo más interesante o emocionante al respecto de DESI?
La escala de los proyectos en los que estamos trabajando es simplemente increíble, en varios sentidos:

El mapa más grande del universo
El mapa más grande de la Vía Láctea
Millones de espectros, miles de fibras, decenas de espectrógrafos.

Es emocionante ver cómo todo esto se une.

¿Algún consejo para aspirantes a científicos?
¡Aprende a programar! Hay un montón de cosas interesantes a la espera de ser encontradas en datos científicos reales y hoy puedes encontrarlas desde casa usando sólo una computadora.

¿Qué haces para divertirte?
Recientemente paso mucho tiempo construyendo estructuras y leyendo a mi hijo de dos años. También voy de excursión, juego frisbee y leo para mí mismo.

What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I’m a researcher at LLNL working on the DESI operations team.

Where were you born?
I was born in St. Louis, MO.

Where do you live now?
I live in San Leandro, CA, just south of Oakland.

What do you as part of DESI?
My recent focus has been on testing the accuracy of the fiber positioning and finishing the imaging survey. I also work on the telescope scheduling. My work is entirely on the software side, so on a day-to-day basis I write code and make plots. Finally, I think a lot about how systematics in the imaging can imprint onto the maps we’ll make with DESI.

What is the most interesting or exciting thing about DESI?
The scale of the projects we’re working on is just awesome, in a number of senses:

largest map of the universe
largest map of the Milky Way
millions of spectra, thousands of fibers, tens of spectrographs

It is thrilling to see all of this come together.

Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Learn to program! There is a ton of interesting stuff waiting to be found in real scientific data, and you can find it from home today using just a computer.

What do you do for fun?
Recently, I spend a lot of time building structures with and reading to my two-year-old son. I also hike, play frisbee, and read to myself.

¿Cuál es tu rol en DESI?
Soy parte del equipo que desarrolló los GFA. Personalmente implementé el firmware que se ejecuta en los GFA, y participé en algunas partes del software, así como en algunas tareas de administración. [Nota: El GFA es la cámara de guía, enfoque y alineación en el plano focal.]

¿Dónde naciste?
En Barcelona, España.

¿Dónde vives ahora?
En una pequeña ciudad llamada Terrassa, cerca de Barcelona.

¿Qué actividades realizas en DESI?
Los GFA son controladores CCD con un pequeño factor de forma utilizado en la Guía, Enfoque y Alineación en DESI. Fueron completamente diseñados y desarrollados en el IFAE en Barcelona. Ahora, estamos enfocados en la búsqueda de errores y en resolver algunos problemas que se detectaron durante la puesta en marcha de DESI.

¿Qué dirías que es lo más interesante o emocionante al respecto de DESI?
Siempre me ha apasionado la ciencia y la tecnología. Esto me llevó a obtener un título en Física y otro en Ingeniería Electrónica. Trabajar en DESI, así como en otros proyectos en los que colaboro en mi instituto, me permite aplicar mis habilidades técnicas en proyectos de Física, en los cuales puedo disfrutar de las dos partes del proyecto: la ciencia y la ingeniería. Además, me da la oportunidad de viajar a lugares maravillosos, con asombrosos instrumentos de investigación, y conocer gente muy interesante.

¿Algún consejo para un aspirante a científico?
Supongo que esto no va a sonar original, pero le diría que trabaje duro, que sea apasionado y que no tenga miedo de asumir responsabilidades.

¿Qué haces para divertirte?
Soy fotógrafo aficionado, y siempre estoy pensando en apps, o dispositivos electrónicos que pueda construir.

Elise Darragh-Ford

pfagrelius

Victoria Fawcett, Durham University

July 22, 2021

David Schlegel, DESI Project Scientist

July 22, 2021

Aaron Meisner, NOIRLab

November 17, 2020

Adam Myers, University of Wyoming

November 4, 2020

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