About Harrison Harper
I hold First Class Honours in Physics from the University of Tasmania. I build gamma-ray burst photometry pipelines and real-time alert tools for astronomy, make photographs and build a variety of random projects.
Education
Bachelor of Science (Honours), Physics, University of Tasmania, 2026. Graduated with First Class Honours. My thesis focused on automated gamma-ray burst detection from telescope imaging data.
Research and technical work
Much of my astronomy work takes raw telescope frames through to measurements that can be used with confidence. I build automated FITS pipelines for source extraction, astrometry, and time-based stacking. The same workflow handles a full night of observations consistently.
One pipeline produced the University of Tasmania's first confirmed gamma-ray burst detection, which is being prepared for publication. I also built a GCN alert network, a persistent Kafka consumer that listens to nine instrument topics, converts varied GRB alert formats into a shared schema, and sends observatory-specific alerts to observing teams in near real time.
Recent work includes multi-epoch photometry of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. NASA JPL Horizons Ephemeris provides aperture placement on the moving target, while PanSTARRS and SkyMapper observations provide nightly zero-points across changing conditions. I also fitted a joint transit model of the exoplanet GJ 1132b using Hubble and Spitzer datasets.
Photography
I shoot film, digital and infrared photography. I am drawn to light, texture, and a strong sense of place.
What I work with
Astronomy & data
- FITS reduction and instrument-aware calibration
- Aperture photometry and light curve extraction
- Astrometric solving and time-based stacking
- Catalogue cross-matching (PanSTARRS, SkyMapper)
- Ephemeris queries via NASA JPL Horizons
- Transit modelling with Batman
Engineering
- Python, Astropy, NumPy
- Kafka stream consumers
- SQL and schema normalisation
- Astro, React, TypeScript
- Hand-written CSS and canvas work
Photography
- Infrared and film
- Long exposure and low light
- Landscape and architecture
- Darkroom-style digital processing
Projects at a glance
- Stowpad 2026 Private clipboard manager for Mac that keeps an encrypted, searchable history of everything you copy. It uses on-device OCR to capture text and tables from the screen, then lets you paste any clip back into any app — with no account or cloud sync.
- Portfolio Site 2026 A personal portfolio built with Astro, custom CSS, and canvas effects. The site includes a particle system that transforms into text, time-of-day sky colouring, magnetic hover effects and a photography archive.
- GCN Alert Network 2025 Persistent Kafka consumer across nine instrument topics that normalises GRB alert formats into a single internal schema. Routes observatory-filtered notifications to observing teams in near real-time.
- GRB Detection Pipeline 2025 Automated FITS reduction pipeline for calibration, source extraction, astrometry and time-based stacking. It produced the University of Tasmania's first confirmed gamma-ray burst detection, which is being prepared for publication.
- 3I/ATLAS Photometry 2025–2026 Multi-epoch light curve pipeline for interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. Ephemeris queries from NASA JPL Horizons automate aperture placement on the moving target; nightly zero-points are derived from PanSTARRS and SkyMapper catalogues to account for varying conditions across sessions.
- Exoplanet Transit Analysis: GJ 1132b 2024 Joint transit model fitted to Hubble and Spitzer datasets. Each instrument processed with its own calibration routines before normalisation; Batman extracted the transit depth and physical parameters of the planet from the combined light curve.
- React & Motion Dashboard 2024 A dashboard of animations and interactive effects built in React and Motion. Magnetic cursors, physics springs, gesture-driven components, and other UI experiments collected in one place.