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You might know that the Solar System has a bunch of planets, and a bunch of smaller bodies called comets and asteroids. This “small stuff” is mostly in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, which includes Pluto. If you look at some of these images and find one with Pluto in it, you’ll see that Pluto is only one of a whole bunch of guys in the Kuiper belt, which is why we decided to stop calling it a planet. Real planets like Earth and Jupiter don’t have a whole pile of other guys orbiting with them.

Mostly I look for asteroid and comet belts around other stars.  There’s an image of one around Fomalhaut further down the page. These not only look cool, but tell us about what kind of planetary systems these stars have.

Most of my work uses space telescopes. The red part of the picture of Andromeda on the Space Zone home page is a picture taken in the infra-red with the Herschel Space Observatory, the same telescope I use for a lot of things.

To do astronomy you need a computer. All of the pictures we take these days are digital, so we need computers to analyse the images. Normally we make interesting plots and figures that tell us what’s going on with the data.

Here’s a really cool one I made, which shows stars that are being looked at by Kepler, an American space mission that is discovering loads of planets around loads of other stars. It’s just a picture of the part of the sky that Kepler is looking at, with yellow dots for interesting stars, little rectangles for the parts of the sky that Kepler is looking at, and the grey background shows some of the dust in our Galaxy.

Once I have a bunch of interesting plots, I write a story about them. I normally have some help from other people I work with too, which is very helpful. When the story is finished, we send it to a journal that publishes it, and then anyone can read about what I’ve found.