Miles Lucas

About Me

I was born in Denver and grew up in Eastern Iowa. I completed my undergraduate degree in physics with minors in astronomy and computer science at Iowa State University in 2019. Currently I am a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Astronomy at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. I earned my M.S. in astronomy in 2021. I am currently finishing my Ph.D. project (Winter 24 - Spring 25) and am actively seeking post-doctoral opportunities in high-contrast instrumentation and protoplanetary disk imaging.

Research Interests

High-contrast Imaging

My Ph.D. research revolved around upgrading the visible-light high-contrast polarimeter SCExAO/VAMPIRES. I find the intersection of optics, systems engineering, programming, and data management interesting and fulfilling, and I specialize in polarimetric instrumentation. Polarimetry is a highly effective tool for studying circumstellar disks and I have pioneered new observational techniques for SCExAO which enable simultaneous polarimetric differential imaging with three high-contrast instruments (VAMPIRES, FastPDI, and CHARIS).

Programming

I enjoy using programming to solve astronomical problems and provide tools for other astronomers. I specialize in image processing, data processing pipelines, and Bayesian statistical modeling. I am proficient in Python and Julia, and have contributed many open-source packages in both languages. Check out my code on GitHub.

Personal Interests

Outside of research, I enjoy cooking, baking, photography, astrophotography, climbing, hiking, biking, and drumming. You can see a selection of my favorite photos in my portfolio, which, unfortunately, has not been updated in recent years. I’ve been featured in NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day (APOD) for this star trails photo I took during a summer research internship at the Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico.

Posts

Regex for Astronomical Angles

Today I dug a little deeper than I expected into some regex parsing for the AstroAngles.jl package. I wanted to detail the way I approached the problem and the solution I landed on (in hopes that someone will come along and tell me how much better it could have been). Sexagisimal and Angles In astronomy, we represent the coordinates of things on the sky using angles. This is convenient because we can essentially look at the sky as a big sphere with us at the middle and form a coordinate system similar to our latitude and longitude system.

2021-04-22

6 min read

Developing a Single-Pass Weighted LogSumExp Function

Recently I’ve been thinking about the LogSumExp trick since it is used in the integration step of nested sampling. I won’t go over too much of the math here, but the reason this trick exists is to greatly increase the numerical stability of the operation $$ \log \sum_i \exp x_i $$ via the identity $$ a + \log \sum_i \exp\left(x_i - a\right) $$ Naive implementations In Julia we can implement a naive logsumexp with logsumexp_naive(X) = log(sum(exp, X)) let’s test the numerical accuracy against Julia’s BigFloat for some very large numbers

2021-04-19

3 min read