Supervisors: Krzysztof Ulaczyk & Danny Steeghs

Sky surveys have been a key tool in astronomy, ever since the start of systematic plate surveys. Our ability to survey the sky with increasing spatial and time resolution have been behind many discoveries. Time-domain astronomy is seeing an explosion of survey data sampling variability at short timescales. Particularly challenging is to handle data covering the crowded fields at low galactic latitudes where source densities shoot up and intervening dust structures on complex scales affect our ability to recover reliable lightcurves. Yet this is also where the largest concentration of galactic variables can be found. This project will be a mixture of technical work and science exploitation. Galactic-plane imaging data from the GOTO project will be the starting point, initially focussing on developing a robust framework to recover lightcurves of variable objects. This will then naturally evolve towards science exploitation later on.