Homepage of Tom Barclay

Contact Details

About Me

I am a PhD student studying astronomy at Armagh Observatory.

I work on the RaTS project. This is a search for a particular type of binary star with an extremely short orbital period (typically less than 70 mins) known as an AM CVn star. I lead the strand of the project involving data reduction, identification of variable sources and followup observations. We currently have light curves of over 3 million stars and my role is to develop software with which to identify potential AM CVn systems.

I also lead two other projects. The first is a study of the long term variability of the known AM CVn systems. We get weekly observations of all the AM CVn systems visible from the northern hemisphere using the Liverpool Telescope. The second is a search for magnetic fields in AM CVn systems.

A pretty image of globular cluster M56 I made using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma. The image is a composite of 3 colour images.