Hey, I’m Daragh! :P

I’m a PhD student at Dunsink Observatory , Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) - specifically working in the Planetary Magnetospheres group. I study Mercury’s magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar environment through the analysis of large data-sets from NASA’s MESSENGER mission (2011-2015), and upon its arrival, ESA/JAXA’s BepiColombo. My work currently focuses on Mercury’s magnetospheric boundaries - the bow shock and magnetopause and the automated detection of boundary crossings via simple machine learning methods. I’m a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar, fully funded by Research Ireland.

Take a look at what I’ve been working on!

MY UNDERGRAD THESIS: COMET 62P/TSUCHINSHAN 1

As part of my undergraduate degree, I completed a final project on a topic of my choosing. This involved: The preparation of a detailed literature review that addresses a question in modern astronomy.

JUNO UNIVERSAL PLOTTING TOOL (JUPT)

In the summer of 2023, together with the DIAS Planetary Magnetospheres group, I led the development and release of a new plotting tool for data from the Juno spacecraft (currently in orbit around Jupiter).

HORIZONS WALLPAPER

A python script to plot a live wallpaper of the solar system from the orbital information of specified objects. A sample output from the script This script queries the API of NASA JPL’s Horizons System to obtain orbital positions in cartesian coorinates.