Brent Miszalski's Homepage


Herts


I recently moved to the University of Hertfordshire to take up an STFC funded PDRA to work on various aspects of IPHAS and VMC.
These include the global photometric calibration of IPHAS, building an extinction-distance map of the IPHAS region and looking for Planetary Nebulae in VMC.

PhD

I defended my PhD Thesis entitled "New Galactic Planetary Nebulae and the Role of Central Star Binarity" on the 14th of August 2009 in Strasbourg.
The thesis was conducted under a co-tutelle arrangement between Macquarie University and Strasbourg University with supervision from Prof. Agnes Acker and Prof. Quentin Parker.

Please see the publications further down this page for the main results of the thesis.
More results will hopefully be published soon...

PNIC

 A mirror of Bruce Balick's Planetary Nebulae Image Catalogue (PNIC) in gallery form.

Skencil Tips for Postscript Figure Manipulation

Astronomers often have to work with postscript figures for theses, papers, telescope time applications, etc. Some operations such as embedding latex formulae, embedding postscript figures in other postscript figures, amongst other operations, can be very difficult if not impossible. Fortunately, there exists a little known vector drawing package for linux/macosx called Skencil.

I have written a small tutorial on manipulating postscript figures with skencil that can be found here.

Honours

As part of my Honours year at Macquarie/AAO I developed a new field configuration algorithm for 2dF configure. I worked with Keith Shortridge, Will Saunders, Scott Croom, Quentin Parker and Rob Sharp at the AAO. This work was enabled by a generous Macquarie/AAO Honours scholarship that was established to encourage students to embark upon instrumentation science based Honours projects.

Here are some relevant links:
  • A copy of my Honours thesis can be found here (5.8M). You may also find a bound copy in the AAO library if you ask Sandra nicely.
  • An AAO newsletter article on my work can be found in the February 06 edition at the usual place.
  • PAPER TO REFERENCE FOR NEW SA CONFIGURE:
    MISZALSKI ET AL. (2006), MNRAS, 371, 1537.
  • An archive of Phil Outram's work on configure can be found here.
  • A new version of configure containing my work can be found here.
  • If even the newsletter is too long, perhaps my Bok Prize Talk is appropriate? (17 slides of happiness) You can find it here (3.3M).
(Essential reading if you are serious about getting the most out of 2dF-AAOmega, 6dF or possibly even FLAMES; I suggest starting with the AAO newsletter article though.)

Refereed Publications

  1. Viironen K., Greimel R., Corradi R. L. M., Mampaso A., Rodriguez M., Sabin L.; Delgado-Inglada G., Drew J. E., Giammanco C., Gonzalez-Solares E. A., Irwin M. J., Miszalski B., Parker Q. A., Rodriguez-Flores E. R. & Zijlstra A, Candidate planetary nebulae in the IPHAS photometric catalogue, 2009, A&A, 504, 291

  2. Miszalski B., Acker A., Parker Q.A. & Moffat A.F.J., 2009, Binary planetary nebulae nuclei towards the Galactic bulge. II. A penchant for bipolarity and low-ionisation structures, A&A, 505, 249

  3. Miszalski B., Acker A., Moffat A.F.J., Parker Q.A. & Udalski A., 2009, Binary planetary nebulae nuclei towards the Galactic bulge. I. Sample discovery, period distribution, and binary fraction, A&A, 496, 813

  4. Miszalski B., Acker A., Moffat A.F.J., Parker Q.A. & Udalski A., 2008, Discovery of Eclipsing Binary Central Stars in the Planetary Nebulae M 3-16, H 2-29 and M 2-19, A&A, 488, L79

  5. Miszalski B., Parker Q.A., Acker A., Birkby J., Frew D.J. & Kovacevic A., 2008, MASH-II: More Planetary Nebulae from the AAO/UKST H-alpha Survey, MNRAS, 384, 525.

  6. Cohen M., Parker Q.A., Green A.J., Murphy T., Miszalski B., Frew D.J., Meade M.R., Babler B., Indebetouw R., Whitney B.A., Watson C., Churchwell E.B. & Watson D.F., 2007, Spitzer IRAC observations of newly-discovered planetary nebulae from the Macquarie-AAO-Strasbourg H-alpha Planetary Nebula Project, ApJ, 669, 343.

  7. Parker Q.A., Acker A., Frew D.J., Hartley M., Peyaud A.E.J., Ochsenbein F., Phillips S., Russeil D., Beaulieu S.F., Cohen M., Koppen J., Miszalski B., Morgan D.H., Morris R.A.H., Pierce M.J. & Vaughan A.E., 2006, The Macquarie/AAO/Strasbourg Halpha Planetary Nebula Catalogue: MASH, MNRAS, 373, 79.

  8. Miszalski B., Shortridge K., Saunders W., Parker Q.A. & Croom S.M., 2006, Multi-Object Spectroscopy Field Configuration by Simulated Annealing, MNRAS, 371, 1537.

Non-Refereed Publications

  1. Miszalski B., Acker A. & Parker Q.A., 2008, The Galactic Bulge traced by Planetary Nebulae, Besancon Galactic Workshop Talk, http://www.obs-besancon.fr/AtelierGalaxie/.

  2. Miszalski B., Acker A. & Parker Q.A., 2007, Central Stars of MASH Planetary Nebulae, Hydrogen-Deficient Stars, 391, 181.

  3. Miszalski B., Acker A., Parker Q.A. & Moffat A.F.J., 2007, MASH-II and an OGLE-II Search for Binarity, APNIV Conference Proceedings (in press).

  4. Birkby J., Parker Q., Miszalski B., Acker A. & Frew D., 2007, Examples of new evolved planetary nebulae from the SuperCOSMOS H-alpha survey, Anglo-Australian Observatory Newsletter, 111, 22.

  5. Miszalski B., Shortridge K., Saunders W., Parker Q. & Croom S., 2006, A new field configuration algorithm for AAOmega, Anglo-Australian Observatory Newsletter, 109, 24.


For author list conventions see here.

PNDR

PNDR source code and documentation can be found here

Collaborators

Contact Details

Last Update: Thu Nov 19 2009