July 15

Today we visited one of the remote sensing labs. There they work on developing the technology used to take high quality pictures of the earth and infrastructure from a long ways away, usually from an airplane. One technology that they are currently working on is to detect propane, methane, and other gas leaks so that a quick fly-by can check for malfunctions in large processing plants and pipe-lines. Remote sensing seemed like it was making some really interesting progress and the researcher there mentioned that some interns might have the opportunity to help out occasionally. With any luck I will be able to take some time out of my astronomy work to do a little remote sensing research. After the tour, the real work began. My task today was to start collect and catalog the optical images of the galaxies that I already have UV data for. It took most of the morning to download them all off the internet, and then we had our coffee break followed shortly by our lunch, and that was followed by our meeting where we report our progress for the week to Steffi and Chris. After explaining what I had done and what I was doing next, Chris recommended that I use the optical images from the Hubble Telescope that RIT has on file. So Jake sent me the location of the files and I started over in my search for optical images of my galaxies. After that, I had just enough time to save a few of them as both jpeg and fits files so I can work with them later and so I can post the online (hopefully tomorrow). Thats about it, 15 minutes and we have our afternoon meeting and I get to explain everything I just wrote to the group, and then Im out of here!