Homepage of Stefan Uttenthaler

Welcome to my homepage!
I am a Post-Doc working in astronomy at the Instituut voor Sterrenkunde at the University of Leuven (Belgium). My scientific interests are nucleosynthesis and mixing in RGB and AGB stars, the Galactic bulge and its (AGB) stellar population, infrared astronomy and instrumentation, optical and infrared spectroscopy, etc. You can browse my publications on ADS to find out more about my scientific interests and output so far.

Please find here my CV.

Find here a copy of my PhD thesis on "Nucleosynthesis and mixing processes in Galactic bulge AGB stars"!

Science

This table lists some observing programs that I am or have been involved in:

Program Title	Telescope, Instrument	PI / CoI	Observations started in
CRIRES-POP: A new high resolution near-IR spectral library	VLT-UT1, CRIRES	CoI	October 2009
The evolutionary status of Mira stars with a changing pulsation period	Mercator, Hermes	PI	July 2009
Confining lithium-rich phases on the RGB	VLT-UT2, FLAMES-Giraffe	CoI	June 2009
Cool Bottom Processing in Li-rich Galactic bulge AGB stars?	VLT-UT1, CRIRES	PI	June 2009
The variability of the lithium line in C-type AGB stars	Mercator, Hermes	PI	April 2009
Technetium and Cool Bottom Processing in the Galactic S-star V441 Cyg (DDT)	2.2m on Calar Alto, FOCES	PI	June 2008
Tracing the AGB evolution and dust formation through high resolution near-infrared spectroscopy	VLT-UT1, CRIRES	CoI	June 2008
The mass dependence of Fluorine synthesis in massive Galactic AGB stars	VLT-UT1, CRIRES	PI	May 2008

To conduct science with these observations, I am collaborating with several other scientists, spread over this planet:

Joris Blommaert in Leuven, Belgium
Thomas Lebzelter and the AGB research team in Vienna, Austria
Hans Ulrich Käufl at ESO Garching, Germany
David Yong, Amanda Karakas, and Peter Wood at Mount Stromlo observatory and the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia
Mathias Schultheis in Besançon, France
Nils Ryde in Lund, Sweden
Bernhard Aringer in Padua, Italy
Maurizio Busso, Sara Palmerini, and Roald Guandalini in Perugia, Italy
Matthias Stute in Torino, Italy
Raghvendra Sahai at JPL, California
Martin Groenewegen at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels

With other scientists, I have more informal contacts, which are not (yet) manifested in common observing projects or papers.

Instrumentation

I am and have been involved in a few instrumentation projects. During my PhD thesis, partly carried out at ESO headquarters, I was involved in the CRIRES spectrograph project, in particular during commissioning and science verification runs. See also Chapter 6 of my thesis (link above) for my contribution to this spectrograph.

Recently, I became involved in the Phase A study of METIS (Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph), the proposed mid-IR instrument for ESO's E-ELT. The documents of the Phase A study have been submitted to ESO on 17 November 2009. In particular, I contributed to the Operational Concepts definition document (calibration of the instrument and correction of observed spectra for telluric absorption lines, etc.).
Note that in my opinion we should actually re-name the E-ELT!

Teaching

Since I am a non-native Dutch speaking person, I cannot teach courses at the K. U. Leuven (I do speak Dutch, but not good enough to teach courses...). Nevertheless, I am supervising students doing their Bachelor and Master research projects. To this end, I choose projects out of my scientific activities and interests. Projects and students that I have supervised so far:

"Temperature estimates of Galactic bulge red giants", Seppe Rogge and Thijs Verroken (Autumn 2008)
"The technetium content of M- and C-type stars in UVES-POP ", Lars Ghys and Karen Stiers (Spring 2009)
"Data mining of Spitzer Catalogues: Search for post-AGB candidate stars in the Galactic Bulge", Kristof Moors and Vincent Van Eylen (Autumn 2009)
"Correcting infra-red spectra for telluric absorption lines: comparison of different codes for synthetic transmission spectra calculation", Ruben Berckmans and Endashew Woldegiorgis (Autumn 2009)
"The evolutionary status of Mira stars with a changing pulsation period", Kevin Voet and Koen Van Stiphout (Spring 2010)

Previously, I was also a tutor in laboratory exercises at the University of Vienna.

Public Outreach

One of the things that I like to do most is telling other people about the universe, and sharing my knowledge about it. Because of this, I have quite a record of public outreach activities.

During my undergraduate and graduate studies at the Department of Astronomy in Vienna, I participated in many outreach activities, such as the Science Week, days and nights of open doors, Austrian day of Astronomy, etc.
Before I moved to ESO in Germany, I worked for several years at the Kuffner observatory in Vienna where I gave talks and guided star tours.
At ESO, I enjoyed showing around visitors in the beating heart of European astronomy at the Day of Open Doors.
For the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009), I organised a series of public lectures on astronomical topics, and wrote a blog on Cosmic Diary.

Hobbies

In my spare time I like to do sports (mostly running, football, swimming, badminton, mountaineering, climbing [only indoors so far]), but I also like photography. You can enjoy some of the photos of green flashes that I took during sunsets on La Palma (#1, #2, #3), of the VLT platform on Paranal, or some of the 3D pictures I like to take: #1, #2, #3, #4 (you need red-blue glasses to see the 3D effect). These are just a few examples of the kinds of photos I like to take.