I am what people call a "professional" astronomer, that is, I get paid for doing astronomy.
I did my PhD in Hamburg, Germany on "Accretion, winds and jets: High-energy emission from young stellar objects" and I still work mostly in the X-ray regime (using the Chandra or XMM-Newton satellites) and on the far-UV (with the Hubble space telescope and the FUSE satellite). As such, I rarely see or even touch telescopes and I know very litte about the techniques of optical spectroscopy, in fact I have never seen a spectrograph with my own eyes. However, I know what we can learn from spectra about the physical state of classical T Tauri stars.
Currenlty, I am a Post-Doc at the Harvard-Smithonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, USA.
I have come to this forum to ask for your help with an observation project. I emailed with Christian Buil and he posted an announcement on this forum at
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=246
because time is running short (the observations are in a few days) and I did not have an account until today.
It would be great if you are willing to help me and take spectra of SU Aur during my upcoming observations of XMM-Newton.
Thanks for your help!
Hans Moritz