My name is Max Morris and I am an undergraduate Physics and Astronomy major at Carleton College. I was also a research intern at the 2026 CIERA REU.

My research has covered two different portions of astronomy instrumentation. At Carleton College, I work on the LHR Solar Spectroscopy Project with Ryan Terrien, analyzing the RV shift stability of Fe I 1565 nm transition observations over time. As part of this collaboration in 2025, I helped build a copy of the LHR with the addition of a second, movable piezo-actuated mirror, added to characterize a previously observed solar antenna pattern drift. The analysis of the data from this experiment is still in progress.

As a member of the 2026 CIERA REU cohort, I worked with Giles Novak with data from the TolTEC Camera. I successfully removed blurring, cleaned out artifacts, and corrected the pointing of a composite image of the nearby star formation region Rho Oph A. I also compared the 1.1mm image to a similar JCMT image at 0.85mm, finding no major differences after resolution smoothing. This image is likely to be added to an upcoming TolTEC public release, and science analysis of the image is forthcoming.

Publications List: None, yet.

Optical portion of the LHR copy from 2025:

Image of Rho Oph A from 2026: