Hello!

I’m an astrophysics Honours student at the University of Cape Town, and what excites me most is the whole chain from sky to science: the telescopes and electronics that catch the light, the software that points them, and what the data turns out to say. I learn by building things and finding out where they break. Since 2024 I’ve been part of the team reviving ROTSE-IIIc, a robotic telescope in Namibia that sat dormant for nearly a decade. I designed its new control system and wrote its mount driver, and since 2025 it has been observing again, operated remotely from Cape Town. I also contribute to the open-source pyobs observatory control system and build tools for SAAO’s Intelligent Observatory. Some of what I’ve worked on:

I'm currently doing a BSc (Hons) in Astrophysics & Space Science at the University of Cape Town, supervised by Dr R. Kuhn. My project is to clean up KELT-South light curves and tune transit searches so we can find exoplanets hiding in them.

There’s always a side project on the go, because the best way I know to understand something is to build it: a galaxy-merger simulation I wrote from scratch in C, a star map maker anyone can use for free, a simulator for the way stars ring like bells. The other half of it is sharing the sky: I co-founded Zulelinye Outreach, and I make tactile models so that blind and visually impaired people can explore real telescope data by touch.

What I want to keep working on is time-domain astronomy: robotic telescopes and the software that runs them, transients such as X-ray binaries and cataclysmic variables, and machine learning for astronomical data.

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