Harrison
Harper
Astrophysics Photography Software
Astrophysicist, photographer
and builder of things.
About
I build the software that gets a telescope onto a gamma-ray burst while it is still bright, and photograph the Tasmanian coast in infrared and on film.
I'm Harrison Harper. I graduated from the University of Tasmania with First Class Honours in Physics and work as a photographer and software developer. My research is in time-domain astronomy: automated FITS reduction and photometry pipelines, and the real-time alert infrastructure that gets a telescope onto a gamma-ray burst while it is still bright.
That work includes the pipeline behind the University of Tasmania's first confirmed gamma-ray burst detection, a Kafka-based GCN alert network spanning nine instrument topics, and multi-epoch photometry of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Away from the data, I shoot infrared and film photography around Hobart and the Tasmanian coast, and build interactive things for the web.
More about me- Based in
- Hobart, Tasmania
- Degree
- BSc (Hons) Physics, First Class Honours
- University
- University of Tasmania
- Research
- Time-domain astronomy
- Photography
- Infrared, film and digital
Selected research / projects
Pipelines, alerts and software.
All research / projects- 01 GRB Detection Pipeline Automated FITS reduction pipeline for calibration, source extraction, astrometry and time-based stacking. It produced the University of Tasmania's first confirmed gamma-ray burst detection, which is being prepared for publication.
- 02 GCN Alert Network Persistent Kafka consumer across nine instrument topics that normalises GRB alert formats into a single internal schema. Routes observatory-filtered notifications to observing teams in near real-time.
- 03 3I/ATLAS Photometry Multi-epoch light curve pipeline for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Ephemeris queries from NASA JPL Horizons automate aperture placement on the moving target; nightly zero-points are derived from PanSTARRS and SkyMapper catalogues to account for varying conditions across sessions.
- 04 Exoplanet Transit Analysis: GJ 1132b Joint transit model fitted to Hubble and Spitzer datasets. Each instrument processed with its own calibration routines before normalisation; Batman extracted the transit depth and physical parameters of the planet from the combined light curve.
- 05 Stowpad Private clipboard manager for Mac that keeps an encrypted, searchable history of everything you copy. It uses on-device OCR to capture text and tables from the screen, then lets you paste any clip back into any app.
- 06 React & Motion Dashboard A dashboard of animations and interactive effects built in React and Motion. Magnetic cursors, physics springs, gesture-driven components, and other UI experiments collected in one place.
Photography
Light, texture and place.
An ongoing archive of infrared, film and digital photographs.
Open the archive12
