Dr. R. Chris Smith Director, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory Associate Director, National Optical Astronomy Observatory La Serena, CHILE and Tucson, Arizona, USA Email: csmith@noao.edu Phone (in Tucson): 520-777-0005 (w/ voicemail) Phone (in Chile, from U.S.: 011+): 56-51-205214     OR (from U.S.: 011+): 56-51-205200 (receptionist) FAX (in Chile from U.S.: 011+): 56-51-205212 WWW: http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~chris FTP: ftp://ftp.ctio.noao.edu/pub/chris

The picture above is a multicolor image of a region of the LMC, one of our nearest neighbooring galaxies. Red is hydrogen emission, green is sulfur emission, and blue is oxygen emission. The pink regions are HII regions and the greenish regions (in the upper right just below the center) are newly identified supernova remnants (SNRs)

Projects & Surveys I'm involved in...

• DES - the Dark Energy Survey, a survey designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision, using four independent methods to constrain the properties of dark energy.
• BCS - the Blanco Cosmology Survey, a NOAO survey program on the Blanco 4m to study the cosmic acceleration using two different techniques. The first is a galaxy cluster survey in coordination with mm-wave surveys like APEX, ACT and SPT. The second is using the galaxy power spectrum to measure cosmological distances out to redshift z~1.
• OLS - the Outer Limits Survey, a photometric survey of the extremities of the Magellanic Clouds
• MCELS - the UM/CTIO Magellanic Cloud Emission-line Survey
• The ESSENCE/w Project - the High-z Supernova team's project to determine the equation of state of the Dark Energy
• SuperMacho - the Next Generation Microlensing Survey of the LMC
• The High-z Supernova Search, the team that shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for the shared discovery of the accelerating universe.
• NGSS - the Nearby Galaxies Supernova Search
• SINGG - Survey for Ionization in Neutral Gas Galaxies
• Local Group Survey

Future Projects I'm involved in...

• LSST - the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Other science interests...

• Galactic Supernova Remnants
  • RCW 86
  • Vela
  • Other Galactic SNRs
• Magellanic Cloud Supernova Remnant Sample
• Nearby Supernova Studies
• Interstellar Medium of our Galaxy and nearby galaxies

Observatory Responsibilities

• Director, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory
• Head of Mission, AURA Observatory in Chile

Vitae and Publications

The weather in La Serena...

The weather on Cerro Tololo: SITE INFO

Last updated: 2011 November
MAIL: csmith (AT) noao.edu