John P. HuchraProfessor

My name is John Huchra, and I'm the Robert O. & Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology and the Senior Advisor to the Provost for Research Policy at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the OIR Division . I am in the Department of Astronomy , and the Harvard College Observatory. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) is part of the Smithsonian Institution , and the Center for Astrophysics is the amalgam of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. I've developed this website in order to tell you a bit about myself and also to provide some useful information on my past and current research projects, courses I offer, and other useful information. I've been involved in a number of large projects in astronomy, and this is one useful gateway to some of the databases my colleagues, students and I would like to make publicly available. There are links below to download most of the large galaxy databases we've produced or in the sub-pages on ZCAT, 2MASS, etc. At the end of this page are some useful astronomical and other links. My research interests include the study the Large-Scale Structure in the Universe, the general study of Observational Cosmology including the determination of the expansion rate, age and fate of the Universe, observations of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), and galactic evolution, particularly star formation in galaxies and globular star cluster systems surrounding other galaxies. I've worked in many areas of astronomy, and especially love teaching and observing (and just about anything that gets me onto a mountain top). Perhaps my most well known work is on mapping the Universe, that is making maps of the distribution of galaxies around us. For the last decade, Margaret Geller and I and our students and co-workers have been measuring relative distances via redshifts for about 18,000 bright galaxies in the northern sky. Next on the list is my work on the extragalactic distance scale that started with a collaboration with Marc Aaronson and Jeremy Mould and currently is bound into the HST H0 Key Project. Most recently, I began a major new redshift survey based on the 2 Micron All Sky Survey and aimed at producing a complete and accurate, all-sky map of the local galaxy density field out to a redshift of ~0.1. This work is being done in collaboration with the other folks on the 2MASS science team with extragalactic interests, Steve Schneider at UMASS and Mike Skrutskie at Virginia, and Tom Jarrett, Tom Chester and Roc Cutri at IPAC, to name just a few of the principals. The 2MASS survey itself was finished in the winter of 2000/2001, and produced a catalog of over a million galaxies brighter than K_S = 14.0. The final versions of the Extended and Point Source catalogs were released in 2003.