Dr. Gilly

I'm a heliophysicist at NorthWest Research Associates in Boulder, Colorado. I study the Sun's corona and the wind it drives across the solar system — coronal heating, the solar wind, forward modeling, and validating what our instruments actually measure. I earned my PhD in Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, working with Steven Cranmer, and I'm one of the algorithm scientists on NASA's PUNCH mission. Along the way I developed Radial Histogram Equalization (RHE/RHEF), a coronal-contrast method now distributed in sunpy's sunkit-image.

Off the clock, I make things — music and theater, public science talks, and small web toys that live on this domain.

Email me Publications

This site is hand-built and deliberately simple: static HTML, one CSS file, a little vanilla JavaScript, and a single Cloudflare Worker (the ensō impressions endpoint). No npm, no bundler, no framework — every page is something you could open and read. Deployment is just git push.

The look comes from the site's own toys. The ensō calendar and editor settled on a warm-paper-and-ink palette with a single gold accent and a flash-free dark mode; the whole site now shares those exact design tokens. A small detail I'm fond of: the calendar and the editor reproduce the same daily ensō from the same date, byte for byte, by pulling the same pseudo-random draws in the same order — a determinism contract that lets the "edit this day" button round-trip perfectly. Each day's ensō also gets a one-line impression from a small language model, guided by a system prompt that reads the circle as a state of mind (ensō, mushin, ma).

The visual foundations began life as the HTML5 UP “Strata” template, used and adapted under CC BY 3.0. See also the archive of older pages.