Kevin Volk

CSA NIRISS Support Astronomer
Space Telescope Science Institute

3700 San Martin Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
Phone: 410-338-4409
Fax: 410-338-5090
E-mail: volk AT stsci.edu
Web: www.stsci.edu/~volk

Current Position

I am working at STScI in Baltimore as a support astronomer for the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph/Fine Guidance Sensor, which is part of the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope mission. The instrument is being built by the Canadian Space Agency. As part of this effort my position at STScI is supported from Canada. The NIRISS instrument was previously the Tunable Filter Imager (TFI).

Before moving to Baltimore in the spring of 2009 I had spent 6 years at Gemini Observatory , mostly supporting the mid-infrared instruments Michelle and T-ReCS. Switching to support of the TFI/NIRISS instrument, which is completely different in design and wavelength range than the thermal infrared astronomy I was used to, was quite a big change in duties. Now some years later I am still not entirely used to the change, but I now know a lot more about etalons and grisms than I did before I came here.

FGS/TFI Ground Testing Completed!

The FGS Performance Verification Cryotests were carried out between November 2011 and January 2012 at the David Florida Laboratory facilities in Ottawa. Thanks to heroic efforts by the COM DEV staff the tests were completed in spite of a number of hardware and software problems that came up during the tests.

The science tests that I asked for were carried out, and the analysis of the results is going to be occupying my time for quite a while.

What is a "Support Astronomer" anyway?

One might ask what I do when the NIRISS instrument is still being built and will not be in operation on JWST for some years as yet. Well, my main focus is on the calibration of NIRISS. The type of things that I am working on include:

defining what steps will be needed in the (eventual) data reduction pipeline for NIRISS;
helping to develop the plans for the ground testing of NIRISS along with the engineers who are building NIRISS, and making plans for the eventual on-orbit calibration of NIRISS;
supporting instrument testing, and carrying out analysis of the ground test data;
verifying from the measurements which we have that the instrument will perform as expected on-orbit; and
producing initial versions of the calibration files needed for data reduction.

This means in practical terms that (a) I write a lot of reports on these things and (b) I have a 1 TByte disk full of ground test data on which I am carrying out analysis.

Useful Links

I have made a magnitude/flux conversion page which allows conversion between different flux density units or conversion between many optical or infrared magnitude systems and flux density units
(this page is hosted by Colin Aspin of the IFA in Hawaii)
I had various utility pages at my Gemini staff page which are still active (at least for the moment). I have not been able to put these up locally at STScI as yet. The computer security rules here at STScI make it unlikely that they will be moved. The magnitude/flux conversion page is the only one of these I have been able to move elsewhere since leaving Gemini. Some of the pages are still up at the old IRAS site in Calgary, but that machine is now unsupported and may "die" at any time.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day
AAS Homepage (with access to the AAS Job Register)
ADS Abstract Service
SIMBAD Astronomical Database
StarFamily: The CDS Searchable Lists of Astronomical Web Resources with lists of institution pages, personal pages, and abbreviations, acronyms, symbols, etc. (Maintained by A. Heck.)
The Official U.S. Time page in case you want to know the exact time

Research Interests

Dust around evolved stars
Planetary Nebulae and ionized nebulae in general
"Proto-Planetary Nebulae": stars evolving from the asymptotic giant branch phase to the planetary nebula phase of evolution

Research Collaborators

My research is done in cooperation with various people including:

Publication Lists

The list of my refereed publications is here. This is from the ADS Abstract Service searched for "K. Volk" with the papers from Karen Volk, Klaus Volk, and Kathryn Volk removed from the list. I have not found a way to search only for my papers without getting at least a few of these other people's papers as well.

A listing of all of my bibliographic references is here.

My publication totals are currently 101 published papers, and 203 total bibliographic references. On the other hand I am the first author on only 21 refereed papers in total; this is partially because I like doing the work better than I like writing up papers once the work is done.

Recent Paper

I have a paper recently published in the Astrophysical Journal concerning the discovery of carbon-rich proto-planetary nebulae (that is, things that I think will become planetary nebulae soon, rather than meaning stars that are forming planets) in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The paper is Volk et al. (2011), ApJ, vol 735, article number 127. If the IOP web page is slow you can get the PDF file for the paper at this link. When I looked at the paper Astrophysical Journal copy of the article, I discovered some typographical errors in Tables 1 and 2 of the paper where object names are given. One of these errors was also propagated to the text in the name of consistency. As these errors involve the SAGE name of one object and the cross-referencing of the objects with the 2MASS and DENIS catalogues I have made a corrected "preprint" version of the paper which can be found here for anyone who is interested. I just wish that I had noticed this in the page proofs or earlier instead of right after the paper came out in print. The Erratum for this has been published in the ApJ, but the link gives the entire corrected paper.

Writing papers is not my favorate pass-time. However the end result is pleasing when one finally gets the work done. Nonetheless I am not happy with the "publish or perish" mentality that seems to drive a lot of things in science these days. One really solid paper is better than several mediocre papers, but the system is not necessarily set up to allow for this. Tracking citations does not entirely solve this problem because some areas of astronomy are more popular than others, and this affects the citation rates. Some types of basic astronomy or difficult astronomy get short-changed in the citations, in my opinion. (Of course, maybe I would not think this if I were doing something that is popular like extra-solar planet research....)

Style in Science:

The following front two pages of an astronomy paper from 1865 and the associated colour plate (probably from a colour drawing of the spectra) may be of interest. The style of scientific papers has changed mightily in nearly 150 years.

I am not sure that the current style is an improvement. At least, not when I write papers. Some others may have more style in writing papers than I do.

End Word:

If you think that you know the right answer to something, the following may give you food for thought: there might be another interpretation that you did not think of.

(Note: the original version of the above image adds "They are also usually wrong." under the word "Simplicity". However I do not like that: there is a big difference between "wrong" and "not what was intended". That is my point here. If the question had said "Find the length of side x", that would have avoided this possible interpretation. And yes of course I know that this is implied in the context of the question, but some of us are literal minded.)