Fallon Konow

About Me

Hello! I'm Fallon Konow, a PhD candidate in my final year of a dual program between Georgia State University (Atlanta, GA, USA) Candidate the University of Rome Sapienza/ University of Rome Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy). I work under Professor Stuart Jefferies and Professor Piet Martens at GSU and Professor Francesso Berrilli at Uni ToV working on the ground-based instrumentation for space weather studies. Currently I work on the GATES (Global Automatic Telescopes Exploring the Sun) Network.

• Learn more about my work with GATES

I am originally from Chicago, but have lived all over the USA (and world) in the last 10 years. I earned my BA in Astronomy & Physics (with a minor in the College of East Asian Studies) from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT, USA) in 2020. During my PhD, I lived in Atlanta, GA for a year before moving to Pasadena, CA to intern at the Jet Propulsion lab. I now split my time between my telescopes in Apple Valley, CA and Rome, Italy.

I am extremely passionate about education and outreach. I've served as a Teaching Assistant for various physics and astronomy courses throughout my undergraduate and graduate careers, and have been active in multiple outreach organizations such as the Georgia Outreach Team for Space and Astronomy on Tap Atlanta.

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GATES

The Global Automatic Telescopes Exploring the Sun (GATES) Network is an international collaboration currently consisting of two telescopes: the Mojave Solar Observatory (MSO) located in Apple Valley, CA, USA and the Tor Vergata Solar Synoptic Telescope (TSST) located in Rome, Italy. Both telescopes are magneto opical filter (MOF)-based and leverage Zeeman spiltting and Faraday rotation to produce incredibly narrow passband images in differing polarization states. Consequently, we use these polarization state observatiosn to construct line-of-sight velocity and magnetic field maps for the full disk of the Sun (center below).

MSO (left) houses a 70 mm apeture, full-disk dual MOF channel telescope observing in K I D1 (769.9 nm) and Na I D2 (589.0 nm) bands; these bands correspond observationally to the mid-photosphere and low chromosphere respectively. Both channels are currently active, and I have obtained over 200 hours of dual-height observations from June - August, 2025. TSST consists of an 80 mm apeture, full-disk K I D1 (769.9 nm) MOF channel and a 127 mm apeture Daystar SR-127 QT Hα telescope. TSST currently observes from the heliostat at the University of Rome Tor Veragata, but its final mounting location will be in the Canary Islands of La Palma, Spain. With the help of the GATES collaboration, I have taken over 10 hours of dual-site observatiosn with TSST and MSO in July 2025.

Throughout my time working with the GATES network, I've worked on the design, construction, alignment, testing, observing campaigns, and data reduction pipelines for both telescopes. Currently, I am investigating acoustic wave propagation through the solar atmosphere using the dual-height MSO data. Specifically, I am investigating the phase travel time variations between active and quiet regions of the Sun. As we continue to observe at MSO, we hope to expand our dataset to include flaring events above C-class so that we can extend our phase travel time investigations to flaring versus non-flaring regions as well.