Joseph L. Hora

Astronomer

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Research Activities

Instrumentation Projects:

IRAC - I am the Project Scientist for the InfraRed Array Camera for the Spitzer Space Telescope , now operating in its "Warm Mission"
MIRSI (Mid-InfraRed Spectrometer and Imager)
NIRI camera, Gemini telescope
IRCS - Infrared Camera and Spectrograph, Subaru telescope
KSPEC - K-band spectrograph
QUIRC - QUick InfraRed Camera
MIRAC - Mid-InfraRed Array Camera

Astronomical Research

My active research is in several areas, including star formation, IR observations of near-earth objects, and near- and mid-infrared observations of planetary nebulae.

Massive Star Formation

Several of my current projects are related to the study of massive star formation in the Cygnus-X region. I led a team that performed a Spitzer Legacy Survey during the cyogenic Spitzer mission, and we performed a survey with Herschel as well as several other investigations of the massive star formation in this region. See some of the images below that resulted from this project.

A related project is called Origin and Evolution of Rich Clusters (performed with Gözde Saral), where we have studied the high mass star forming regions W49, W43, and W51.

Near Earth Object (NEO) Observations with Spitzer

I am part of a team that is studying NEOs with Spitzer. We can more accurately estimate the object's size and its surface properties with infrared observations. See our NEO Survey project web site for more details and access to our database.