College Admissions Essay

Because of my passion to the stars and astronomy, I have started studying of stars and astronomy as amateur astronomer before my high school. In high school by buying my first 6 inch Newtonian telescope, I also began night sky imaging as my main hobby. By passing the national entrance exam (B.Sc Concours), I also have continued astronomy in both observational & theoretical by taking astronomy courses in the department of physics of the university of Zanjan as one of the best departments in astronomy & optics in Iran. In the second year of my undergraduate studies, besides studying common courses, I was selected as director (the youngest one) of the amateur astronomy and observation group of university of Zanjan, because of those experiences

H. Safari of the department and data was recorded in observatory of the university of Zanjan. The results were presented at the 15th meeting on Research in Astronomy at Institute of Advanced Studies in Basic Science (IASBS), Zanjan, Iran. While as B.Sc student, my two reviews were published in “Aseman-e-Shab’’ (night sky) international journal, the only exclusive journal of astronomy in the middle east. One of them was about CCD & CMOS, the detectors that are used in scientific applications, especially in astronomy, and the other was an article that defined two most common methods to reduce aberration effects on astronomical images, Active & Adaptive optics. These topics were going to be my new interests, that were enforced me to choose optics in M.Sc, in the university of Zanjan by passing the national M.Sc entrance exam (M.Sc Concours). Before starting my M.Sc, in the last semester of B.Sc, I involved in a great data reduction & analysis project, which was related to meteorology records of all cities of

Very soon, in the first semester, primary studies of M.Sc thesis was started. Honestly I wanted to perform the thesis in adaptive optics fields, but fortunately or unfortunately, because of some limitation in materials and instruments, the subject was changed to new concept. Is there any way to reduce aberration effects without some complicated methods like adaptive optics? Yes, there is. Shortly, in adaptive optics people reduce the bad PSF and aberration effects, mostly by hardwares, so there should be a way to do completely in the computer by softwares and codes. This is the basic idea of my M.Sc thesis, which was supervised by Dr. Ahmad Darudi, one the most skillful & talented scientist in optics in Iran. More details on the thesis is presented in the abstract of the thesis. This theoretical/experimental thesis was very constructive, during the projects I had to learn most essential skills such as knowledge in scientific softwares, simulations and working in an active optics group at the optics laboratory of the university of Zanjan. In the last months before finishing M.Sc, I had a great opportunity to participate in the winter collage on optics and visit the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy. The activity was related to light; a bridge between earth to space. During the activity I really felt & realized