About Me

My name is Michael Telesco. My story started when I was a kid, but really only recently sprung out last year, February 2023. Living in a place of light-polluted skies, the stars never came out at night—it was only on the remote islands of Florida that the sky first came alive for me. I saw a new world: thousands of stars blanketing our skies, light years away. 

My passion for astronomy manifested soon after my first time under these dark skies. It was one of the most surreal moments in my life, giving me perspective of our place in the universe. From there, I dove into topics related to astrophysics— from the density of black holes to the blinding brightness of pulsars. To explore them further, I started my own astronomy club at school, which became a catalyst for my obsession with astrophotography. Currently, I’m an astrophotographer often out on clear nights shooting all kinds of targets, nebulae and star clusters. 

Once I got settled into this beautiful hobby, I began to think about all of the information in the world of astrophysics that is just waiting to be understood and discovered. This motivated me to apply to multiple summer research programs that would help cure this itch inside of me. 

Through one of them, I conducted real research on exoplanet candidate TOI 3873.01, and was able to validate it was a Hot-Jupiter class exoplanet. Further, using the Emission Spectroscopy Metric (ESM) developed by Kemp- ton et al. (2018), I was able to push for further JWST spectroscopic observations. The paper will be published soon and I will update it once it has.