Jessica Mink Email & Phone Number

I am a positional astronomer who writes software which is widely used in the astronomical community to measure sky positions of objects from images (WCSTools) and motion and distance of objects via their spectral redshift (RVSAO). I got interested in finding the accurate positions of objects after observing the occultations of stars by planets and their rings (and co-discovering the rings of Uranus) and developing a program to predict future occultations. The software I have developed has helped improve access to digital scanned images of Harvard's vast collection of photographs of the sky.I also developed pipeline software to reduce data from spectrographs on the MMT and FLWO telescopes in Arizona. I have been reducing digital spectrograph data since 1974 when I tried to reduce data from one of the first of this type of instrument, MIT's Vidicon Spectrometer, for my master's thesis.I am also a hard-core bicycle commuter who rides to work all year in any weather. I co-founded the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition and served as its first president. I have served on a variety of boards and advisory committees relating to bicycle transportation in Boston, Metro Boston, and Massachusetts, including the group which convinced the MBTA to carry bikes on transit.SpecialtiesI write code in C, Fortran, Perl, various Unix/Linux shell languages, and CL and SPP in IRAF, a widely-used astronomical data system. I know as much as almost anyone about astronomical world coordinate systems, including time and more than I want to about the joys of reducing spectrographic data.I have spent a lot of my non-work time building bicycle transportation and greenway networks in Boston, in Massachusetts, and beyond, working with a variety of organizations, including the Boston Area Bicycle Coalition, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition (MassBike), the Neponset River Greenway Council, the East Coast Greenway, the Boston Natural Areas Network, RozzieBikes, and the Crane Ledge Woods Coalition. I know far too much about the problems which can be encountered when trying to get a bike path built or land preserved.I also study Transcendentalist history, teach it at my Unitarian church, dramatize it with the Women of Brook Farm, sing about it in my church's choir (which is in the parish where the Brook Farm Transcendentalist community was located), and serve on the board of New Brook Farm.