home | roger wesson - nebulousresearch.org

About

Me at Paranal I'm Roger Wesson, an astronomer working at Cardiff University, where I investigate the dust associated with core-collapse supernovae and their progenitors. Previously I was at University College London, working in the sndust group. Before that, I spent four years in Chile, where I was a Fellow at the European Southern Observatory and spent 80 nights a year supporting operations at the Very Large Telescope, including nighttime support on UT3 (Melipal). And before ESO, I was an undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoc at UCL. These pages contain information about my research.

Research

I'm interested in two main topics: firstly, core-collapse supernovae and the dust they produce. How much do they make, when do they make it, and what ultimately happens to it? And secondly, chemical abundances in planetary nebulae and HII regions. These objects are now believed to contain some amount of cold, hydrogen-deficient gas, which affects abundance measurements. What is the origin of this material? Can we constrain its physical conditions and determine accurately the total heavy element content of these nebulae?

My most recent 5 publications:

May 2026: Detection of C₆₀ Combination Bands in the Near-IR Spectrum of Tc 1
Giese, Morgan M., Esposito, Vincent J., Van Schuylenbergh, Simon, Cami, Jan, Peeters, Els, Bhatt, Charmi, Van De Putte, Dries, Tielens, A. G. G. M., et al.
May 2026: MUSE Imaging Spectroscopy of the Fullerene Planetary Nebula Tc 1
Walsh, J. R., Barlow, M. J., Monreal-Ibero, A., Cami, J., Peeters, E., Wesson, R., Bernard-Salas, J., Cox, N. L. J., et al.
May 2026: The Evolution of the Mid-infrared Spectrum of SN 1987A Observed with JWST MIRI/MRS
Kavanagh, P. J., Barlow, M. J., Fransson, C., Larsson, J., Matsuura, M., Sargent, B., Jones, O. C., Meixner, M., et al.
May 2026: Milky Way's warped disc traced by AGB stars
Kushwahaa, Tanya, Matsuura, Mikako, Hunt, Jason A. S., Kawata, Daisuke, Wesson, Roger, Davis, Timothy A.
April 2026: 3D insights into SN 1987A: ALMA observations compared to hydrodynamical explosion simulations
Wesson, R., Gabler, M., Lyons, M., Wildman, J., Matsuura, Mikako, Janka, H.-T., Giudici, B., Cigan, P., et al.

See the full list of 228 papers on my publications page, and where in the sky I've been looking on my sky map page

Codes

Some of the codes I've written:

alfa - automated line fitting algorithm
neat - nebular empirical analysis tool
astro-ph sorter - list up to 30 days of astro-ph abstracts, sorted according to your research interests
airmass.org - visibility plotting tool for observation planning

See more on my codes page.

Photography

I do a lot of astrophotography when I find myself in places with dark skies, and I am an ESO photo ambassador. More details on my photography page.

180 degree panorama of the Milky Way over Paranal

CMBR

By a depressingly huge margin, the most visited part of of my website is still CMBR, a game I made in 2014 based on the wildly popular (at the time) 2048. I also made an absurd joke sequel, CMBR2, which is the second most popular part of my website.