In this article, Cois Coiribe catches up with alumnus Éamonn Harvey, who now works at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Éamonn dives into his childhood motivations, discusses several influences and muses from his time at the University, and reminisces about his nostalgia for Galway City. He also talks about his role as an Optical Engineer, the instrumentation he uses, and how collaboration is what moves science forward.
Meet Dr Éamonn Harvey…
I am the middle child of five, with parents from Donegal and Carlow. I grew up in Cork, after moving there from France when I was young. Eventually, for one reason or another, Galway’s gravity pulled me in.
I have a four-year-old son, Joel, with my wife Ariel, and most of my time outside work is spent playing and drawing with him. Ariel and I met while studying physics together in Galway, although we didn’t date until I returned from doing a Master’s in Paris, shortly before we started our respective PhDs.
For over 25 years, I was a keen skateboarder, spending my evenings exploring the ledges, steps, and rails of our fair isle. Since our son arrived, I’ve been trying to avoid injuries; however, I have come down with late onset athleticism in recent years. So, I now spend my time outside of work and family swimming, running, and cycling – and a bit of fiddle playing in the evenings. I also have an amateur interest in photography, archaeology, and folklore.
What inspired you to study astronomy and astrophysics? How did this lead you to pursue a PhD at University of Galway?
One of my favourite books as a child was The Little Prince; it added the grain that slowly fermented my imagination toward other worlds. Then, when I was 11, I got two books for Christmas: Hubble Images Revisited and Sun, Earth and Sky.
I remember poring over them, enthralled by the life of stars and the mesmerising beauty of nebulae. I needed to better understand these things. But, looking back, I had a general interest in the natural world closer to home as well, and I was unsure if I wanted to study the stars or our ocean at university level. However, I now find myself in a position where I build the instruments that may allow the 11-year-olds of today to explore the oceans of alien planets when they grow up.
After secondary school, I left Cork for Galway, as it offered the most established astronomy undergraduate programme in Ireland. The undergraduate trip to Loiano Observatory and classes in optics, signals, and astronomy, along with a grounding in physics, gave me a solid foundation.
This route of study opened a door to an MSc in Astrophysics and Space Engineering at l’Observatoire de Paris, followed by a few months’ internship under Dr Olivier Chesneau at l’Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, which sharpened my view of the field. But Galway kept calling me back.
My final-year project had already put me in close working contact with University of Galway’s Prof Matt Redman, and that relationship turned into an Irish Research Council PhD fellowship. The real gift of that time was the freedom to design a PhD that fitted my mix of interests in observation and modelling of space clouds created by exploding stars – a rare luxury. Matt’s deep expertise and relaxed style, and the University’s flexible structure, allowed for the crafting of a project that felt authentic rather than prescribed.
Are there any standout memories you have of your time at the University and in Galway City? Any individuals who acted as a mentor or muse?
I made lifelong friends in Galway, having spent my late teens and the majority of my 20s there. From good times with college friends, housemates, to the local skate and music scenes, the memories are too many to choose from. But remembering events like the Macnas Halloween Parade and camping trips to Connemara will always bring a smile.
In terms of mentors, I would reference my PhD supervisor, Prof Matt Redman, although many in physics helped along the way. I particularly enjoyed a lab that involved analysing photographic plates on a light box to identify star formation regions. It was the sort of thing that gives you a real feel for the subject and the evolution of instruments over the past century.
My final-year project on the modelling of a supernova remnant, again with Matt, helped me to begin compiling a box of analysis tools that would prove useful later in my career development. I learned important observational and data reduction skills from Dr Ray Butler, and I also benefitted from formative and insightful lectures on optics and electromagnetism from Drs Devaney and Goncharov.
During the PhD, I was appreciative of University of Galway’s reach and diaspora, such as the close working relationship with the Greek astronomy community, namely Dr Panos Boumis, who acted practically as a second supervisor, and Dr Aaron Golden, who would pop up as support during a talk I was giving at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before his return to Galway.
Not least, the help from and conversations with the other physics PhD students at the time were invaluable, and I will be forever grateful to and thankful for that community. We truly shared the highs and lows that are part and parcel of such a journey.
You now work at UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Royal Observatory Edinburgh as an Optical Engineer. Can you explain what led you to this role, and what type of work you do?
After my PhD in Galway, I did an interim postdoc in Cork, with the native Galwegian Prof Paul Callanan, before moving to a full postdoc as Instrument Scientist on the New Robotic Telescope project at the Astrophysics Research Institute in Liverpool John Moores University. There I learned to translate scientific goals into realistic requirements, balancing what astronomers wanted with what could be manufactured.
It was also in Liverpool that I first truly practised the art of optical design and tolerancing, having unknowingly gleaned a background in the downstairs tearoom in the astronomy corridor at University of Galway, specifically with fellow alumnus Dr Eoin O’Connor. Over five years, I learned to write specs that engineers could build, and scientists could use, as well as designing the optics that can deliver this. This allowed me to develop myself in the pragmatic translation layers that sit at the heart of instrument engineering.
My day to day now can be quite varied. I use CAD-based software for optical design, and develop scripts, mostly in Python, for analysis. I can largely attribute my coding skills to fellow University of Galway alumnus Dr Karol Fitzgerald, with whom I developed a software package for modelling nebulae. I am also involved in the procurement, integration planning, build and testing stages of the astronomical instrument development cycle. I have the privilege of working on some of the future instruments for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), a 40m-class telescope currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The telescope will be large enough to observe nearby Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars.
My main projects are two first-light integral field spectrographs – a spectrograph basically makes a rainbow out of incoming light, and incorporating integral field means that it can make a rainbow out of every part of a picture – this allows for temperature, density, velocity, elemental, and molecular diagnostics of whatever you might be pointing your telescope at. One of the spectrographs will be operating in mid-infrared light (the METIS instrument) and the other observing in the near infrared (HARMONI). These parts of the spectrum of light are important for observing key indicators of life on other planets, as well as diagnosing the strange things lurking at the edge of the Universe and everything in between.
We know from classic media that space is ‘the final frontier’. What does collaboration look like in the field of astronomy and astrophysics, and how can it facilitate progress in this area of scientific study?
I mentioned earlier working with the Greek astronomical community; I cannot begin to describe how invaluable this was to my development. But each new collaboration I became a part of strengthened my research immensely. To name a few, these included collaborations with people from South Africa, Italy, Lebanon, Turkey, Hong Kong, India, China, Nepal, Chile, France, UK, USA, Mexico, Iran, Iraq … a truly international mix that is hard to come by in other disciplines. And there is good reason for this.
One of the truly wonderful things about astronomy is that we are all under the same sky, and politics and borders have no effect on the beauty of Saturn or the phases of the Moon.
I can draw from my own experience here, in the world of transient astronomy (the study of things that go ‘bump in the night’, such as supernovae and other explosive phenomena). Take, for example, a new type of stellar explosion being discovered in Chile’s northern sky; it can then be monitored after sunrise in Chile, and from Brazil, then from the Canary Islands, to Namibia, and on to South Africa, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, and back to Chile again. Such collaborative approaches allow us to probe the evolving physics of exciting objects daily without interruption.
Finally, what excites you most about discovering the secrets of the Universe? Any fun facts you’d like to impart for those interested in studying the stars?
In terms of fun facts about the stars, one of my favourite things to think about is how we can tell what types of stellar ingredients, processes, and events were needed to create our solar system and all the elements within it. One such fact is that we would have needed around three classical nova systems feeding the pre-solar nebula in order to get enough lithium on Earth for the mobile phones and electric cars we use today.
These ingredients would have needed to have been swept up into a system, likely by a supernova blast wave, which would also have held heavier elements, such as gold and uranium. From the chemistry of our solar system alone, our Sun would need to be a third- or fourth-generation star to develop and sustain us. So, the solar system in which we live our daily lives has had several sets of grandparents, and likely great grandparents, dating back to the birth of the first stars in the Universe.
