Yay today was the last full day of work. I spent the morning fiddling with the allignment of the HST and Galex images, again. I used IRAF to move the HST image a certain pixel count up and to the right but when it was all said and done I had lost some of the image and it didn't really look they were perfectly alligned so I'm gonna have to pick back up on this when I start working in the fall because this approach can pretty much be declared a failure. Then we went out to lunch and when we came back we ran through our presentation with Jake, which took like two hours. We made his changes and I am just waiting for Nicole to finish making hers so I can compile the presentation and run it up to Joe Pow. Then I'm out of here. I think we will be in good shape tomorrow though, even though things were sort of thrown together today.

Three more days and counting!! Today I figured out how to rotate the HST images so they would be at the same angle as the Galex images. Then I used congrid to resize the Galex images so that they would match the arc second scale of the HST images. Everything looked good until I went to overlay them at which point I realized that alligning the centers was going to be a little more difficult. The PHD student showed me some procedure in IRAF, another imaging processing programming language like IDL, that might help, but I will have to go talk to him again tomorrow because he said everything so fast that half of it went over my head. Then I made a SBP graph using just the raw data from a point spread function as a sort of proof of concept for the undergrads code. I'm not really sure of the relevance or application of this but Jake asked me to do it at the afternoon meeting with Stefi and Chris so I modified the undergrad code to make it work. Anyway, now theres like 10 minutes until the last meeting of the day so im just gonna hang out for a while. Joe wants our presentations early tomorrow morning so the end is coming fast, faster than I expected.

August 18

Today was another monday, the last monday. I spent the majority of the morning working on my presentation, hopefully what I have now is a final rough draft, of sorts. This presentation is proving more difficult than I originally thought because its hard to split it all up between the four interns. Then I spent the afternoon identifying what UGC galaxies I have (because the headers had the 3C names) and then trying to make HROT work, a rotation command that will help allign them. However, I couldn't find the rotation in the headers so that was my problem of the day, Jake showed me where it is though so hopefully that will help.

August 15

Yay its Friday! Today I worked on my presentation, I got a bunch of slides done, but we still aren't totally sure how we are going to split it up so chances are I am going to have to change some of it. I also did another eye tracking experiment today, a follow up experiment to one of the ones I did earlier this summer. Then Jake came by and I showed him how bad the images he had sent me where so he gave me a bunch of HST UV images of some of my UGC galaxies to overlay with the Galex UV images. I didn't make much progress on that though because I can't use hastrom to do it because I don't want to lose any data on the HST images, and hastrom will shrink them down in pixel size. Something to work on next week I guess, but there isn't much time left.

August 14

Today I redid all of my surface brightness profiles. I adjusted the scale on the spectral indexes and changed a thing with the margins to basically make it prettier. That took most of the morning. Then I started moving the files of the new galaxies from Jake's folder to mine so I could begin working on them. Unfortunately that took over two hours to complete so I worked on my poster in the mean time. With the suggestions from Chris I added some more science to my results section and changed a few other things. Finally, at the end of the day I got to look at some of the new galaxies, but the images are very noisy so that may be a bit of a problem. Ill have to talk with Jake about what exactly he wants done with them tomorrow.

August 13

Today we visited Optimax, a in the Rochester area that basically creates specialized lenses for other companies, like NASA, to use. I cant really say what we saw there because its all company secrets and stuff, but it was pretty cool, a lot of stuff along the lines of ITT. After that we got free lunch on the way home and then I had to go to work. I sent my finished rough draft of my poster to Joe Pow and to Stefi, Jake, and Chris. Then I updated the wiki and added a JPEG version of my poster so that Stefi could see it. Finally I started redoing the surface brightness profiles because the last ones had some problems with the spectral indexes and with some of the alignment of the graphs, both of which were solved in the latest version of the code from the undergrads. The last thing I did before Zosimo attacked my computer to run windows updates was send my abstract for my presentation to Bob for the U of R presentations next week. I will probably start working on that tomorrow.

August 12

Today I finished the final draft of my poster. I went through all the text and made a few changes shortening things up, plus I added and revised the results section to emphasize what was actually gained scientifically from my research. Also, with the help of Joe, I increased the pixel count of my images (in photoshop) so that when the poster gets blown up to 3ft by 4ft the images are at the very worst blurry, but not pixelly. Today we also had our weekly meeting with Chris and Steffi, although Steffi wasnt there so just Chris. Things are definitely winding down around here, Jake mentioned a few more things that I could start working on but they will all take longer to complete than the time I have left here so at the most all I can do is devise the method to complete the process and write it down so that someone else can do it later. My first priority, like all the interns, is going to be getting my presentation done, then maybe I can finish up a little more work for Jake before the summer is over. It all seems like it went by so fast!