Welcome

I am a permanent researcher at the Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón (CEFCA), as the Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ) pipeline scientist; primarily preparing for the upcoming J-PAS survey (we are now in survey comissioning!). I am also leading the pipeline design and implementation of the recently approved (in 2023) ARRAKIHS mission by the European Space Agency (ESA).

At CEFCA, I am also leading a team composed of a PhD student and two postdocs; added with 2 summer internship students in 2023. We are using data from J-PLUS, MUSE, HSC, HST, among others. I am also the founder of GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) and Maneage (Managing data lineage, for exactly reproducible results) which was awarded an RDA Adoption grant in 2019. It is a pleasure to also work with the increasing user and developer communities of these two projects.

With the introduction of the telescope, astronomers have not been using their naked eyes for their professional research any more. Since the introduction of digital detectors and the high processing power of modern computers, today we actually "see" (detect/measure) the heavenly bodies (!) through software, not directly through telescopes any more. Therefore, research in the evolution of galaxies inevitably entails deep involvement in the software that practically define your results. In particular as part of my PhD research in Japan, I developed a new method to detect very diffuse and low surface brightness signal that might have any shape. For an introduction you can see some slides, or a video of my talk in the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (December 2021). The software implementation (NoiseChisel) is released as part of the GNU Astronomy Utilities or Gnuastro.

My research follows an exactly reproducible methodology. To achieve this, I founded Maneage maneage.org) for easy adoption of any research project which is free software and available to be adopted. For an introduction, see arXiv:2006.03018 (published in CiSE), some slides, or a video (Invited 1 hour lecture at CiTIUS in March 2021).