My original observing project was a search for Local Group dwarf galaxies, a fairly long and tedious effort with some useful results. Directly resulting from it is the Faint Galaxy Survey, pushing the limits of detectability against the night sky. Both of these deal with catalogs of about 200-400 objects, a good compromise between having enough instances to say something statistically useful and having few enough to look at each in detail. At Birmingham I have been working with another set of about the same size, but moving into data from several wavelengths, the Local Early-type Galaxy Survey. Constraints of time and funding, however, mean that very little work is being done on that project currently.
The barred-spiral galaxy NGC 1097, images taken in three colors by the CTIO REU students and combined. The reddish dust lanes of the bar contrast with the blue young stars of the spiral arms. In the background is an elliptical galaxy, looking small but possibly just a lot farther away. Just right of the center of the picture is Supernova 2003B; it looks like any of the other bright stars in the field, but they're nearby, within our own Milky Way galaxy, while it's in NGC 1097 and thus something like hundreds of thousands of times more distant.