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McMillan's career has included studies of variable stars, statistics of stellar populations, interstellar dust, interstellar magnetic fields, planetary atmospheres, Doppler shift spectroscopy of stars, astronomical instrumentation, and surveys of asteroids. He has worked in the last four disciplines while at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona.
McMillan's group at LPL was the first to publish stellar Doppler shift (radial velocity; RV) measurements better than +/- 20 meters per second (m/s) in a refereed journal. They also made the first reliable detection of p-mode oscillation in a star other than the Sun (Arcturus), discovered the spectroscopic binary of longest known period, and established a new upper limit on the RV stability of the Sun observed as a point source. That limit was published in 1993 and as of 2006 has been neither challenged nor surpassed. McMillan also further investigated techniques to measure the RVs of stars in ways that minimize contamination of Doppler shift measurements by effects intrinsic to stellar atmospheres.
As Co-Investigator and Project Manager of Prof. Tom Gehrels' Spacewatch Project, McMillan guided the physical realization of CCD surveying as a productive method of exploring the solar system for asteroids and comets. McMillan became the Principal Investigator of Spacewatch in mid-1997. The 1.8-m telescope was completed and the 0.9-m was completely rebuilt with all new optics and detectors under McMillan's leadership, and the 0.9-m scope is now fully automated. The average annual number of detections (discoveries plus followup) of Earth-approaching asteroids (EAs) by Spacewatch from 1998 through 2005 is five times greater than the average from 1990-97. The number of detections of EAs in CY2005 by Spacewatch is 10 times greater than the average for 1990-1997.
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