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 automating the detection of gamma-ray bursts through difference imaging.
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.
My honours work produced the University of Tasmania's first confirmed gamma-ray burst detection, which is being prepared for publication. I also built an alert system for internal use connected to the NASA Genereal Coordinate network (GCN), 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.
Photography
I shoot film, digital and infrared photography. I am drawn to light, texture, a strong sense of place and familiarity.
What I work with
Astronomy & Scientific Computing
- Astronomical image reduction and FITS calibration
- Aperture photometry and transient light-curve extraction
- Astrometric plate solving, image alignment and stacking
- Astronomical catalogue cross-matching with Pan-STARRS and SkyMapper
- Python scientific computing with Astropy, NumPy and related tools
Software & Data Engineering
- Python application and pipeline development
- Real-time event and alert processing with Kafka
- SQL database design and querying
- Astro, React and TypeScript web development
- Scientific data-processing and automation pipelines
Photography
- Digital infrared and analogue film photography
- Long-exposure and low-light photography
- Landscape and architectural photography
- RAW processing and colour work digital editing
- Film development and darkroom experience
Research / 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.
- 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 2026 Persistent Kafka consumer across nine instrument topics that normalises GRB alert formats into a single internal schema. Routes observatory-filtered notifications to observing teams via discord in near real-time.
- GRB Detection Pipeline 2025-2026 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 2026 Light curv construction 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.
- 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.