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Welcome to the home page of Douglas Burke. I am an Astrophysicist at the Chandra X-ray Center, here at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
- Office: B-440
- Work: (617) 496 7853
- Fax: (617) 495 7356
- Email: dburke at cfa.harvard.edu
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Work address:60 Garden Street, MS-2Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
- For a reasonably bad photo, try - from my "Hawaiian days" - this gem. There's also, thanks to Adam Dobrzycki, a more astronomer-friendly version, and an example of how to play pool in Rick's bar, Aspen. I also have an utterly awesome photo of the Lunar eclipse of February 20 2008, which goes to show that you shouldn't get an Astronomer to take a picture of a celestial event.
Scientific stuff
I am interested in using clusters of galaxies to elucidate the evolution of structure in the Universe. Or some-such high-fallutin one-line research description. A more accurate view of my research interests - which also cover galaxy evolution and studies of the major baryonic components in the Universe - can be found by perusing my publication list (last update: 29 February 2008).
There is also my Southern SHARC survey page, which provides machine-readable (ASCII format) versions of the data in Burke et al. 2003, "The Southern SHARC Catalogue: a ROSAT survey for distant galaxy clusters".
Recently some of my time has been spent on projects related to the Virtual Observatory, in particular how semantic-web technologies can be used to improve the use of the data that is now available to us (and that is changing the way we do science if you believe Wired). There is a report now available on my study of faceted browsing and its application to Astronomical searches in the VO era.
Press releases and news items:
- Most Massive Galaxies have Surprisingly Diverse Origins, Gemini Observatory, May 14, 2007
- Missing Mass Exists As Warm Intergalactic Fog, CfA 03-06, February 19, 2003
- Scientists ID intergalactic cold front, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, March 2 2000.
- Cosmic Pressure Fronts Mapped by Chandra, CXC PR: 00-08, March 1 2000.
- Chandra telescope's first light, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, August 26 1999.
Obligatory geek stuff
I use PDL - an "IDL-like" set of packages for perl - to do some of my scientific stuff. I wrote the support for "bad-values" (i.e. PDL::BadValues and PDL::Bad) in PDL, as well as provide bug-fixes and updates to the whole module. If you are interested in PDL, or wonder what it can do for you, then have a look at some success stories or read about PDL, Perl 5, and Perl 6 in Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated With Perl 5.
I use the CIAO software package, so you should too.
See my perl pages for some useful astronomy-related software for perl:
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Astro::Cosmology, a PDL package that makes calculating cosmological distances, volumes, and times a doddle.
The last update of this page was: 22 January 2007.
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Inline::SLang, which allows you to include and use S-Lang code in your perl programs. This may be of interest to Perl-minded astronomers who use CIAO 3. Note that version 1.00 of the module was released on January 4 2005.
The last update of this page was: 5 January 2007.
If you are interested in an editor for XML, in particular for text-orientated formats such as DocBook, then you should look at the Conglomerate editor. I provided some bug fixes and feature enhancements to the display widgets.
