There are many different projects that I am involved in currently.  I helped to build the Dark Energy Camera, pictured below:

It is a very sensitive digital camera much like one that might be in your smartphone, only much bigger — it is more than 1 metre across and has 62 separate detectors that together have 570 million pixels:

This camera is mounted on a large (4 meter) telescope in Chile; the six-story dome that holds this telescope is pictured below:

I am currently analysing data to help us understand how this camera is performing.  We are also in the early stages of building a telescope that will use fibre-optics to collect the light, and tiny robots to position each of the fibres precisely so that it can collect the light from very faint stars or galaxies.  Pictured below are four of the “StarBug” robots “walking” along a glass plate in order to put the fibre just where we want it to be:

A lot of my work requires me to translate the scientific goals of the astronomers into the performance requirements for each of the parts that the engineers build, so I need to have a lot of expertise in both astronomy and engineering!  Pictured below is the testing equipment that helps us to see how the StarBugs perform when they are upside down or sideways:

You can see that the StarBug is still connected to the glass plate, so it passed our test!

I will usually spend part of my day on several different projects, which means I never get bored.  That often includes doing mathematical calculations to understand how the new telescope that we are building will perform, and then switching to analysing data from the Dark Energy Camera.  Below, you can see an example of one astronomical image with the smaller rectangles representing each of the 62 separate detectors:

On the right hand side of the image is a beautiful spiral galaxy that is expanded into a larger image below:

I am also working right now with a couple of uni students to prepare a computer program that will automatically compare different astronomical observations to help us understand the process of how gigantic stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives.

I volunteered as an expert in the MyScience program at Epping West Public School, and I got to see first-hand how the students are learning about the scientific method and applying it to study the world around them.  I think it would be great if they had more resources to expand this program.  Like maybe a telescope so that any student could do scientific observations of the moon or Mars or Saturn, or even the Magellanic Clouds (which are usually hard to see from Sydney, because of all the “light pollution” from the city).