July 23

Today was a day of experimentation. Having finished hastroming all the galaxies yesterday, my next task was to take the images and to some retouching to try and bring out the galaxies and reduce the background noise. Unfortunately, doing this through IDL is not as simple as it may sound. Throughout the day I tried smoothing, un-sharp masking, and both low pass and high pass filtering on galaxy NGC193. My attempts were met with varying degrees of success. The smoothing was a relatively fast and painless way to make some small gains with the resolution of the images, but did little to reduce background noise. The un-sharp making pro file could not be located (for some reason we don't have it) so I tried to do the same thing through a series of high pass filtering, subtractions, and smoothing, but found that it did little to improve the image. The low pass filtering seemed to be my most promising approach, however, after tinkering with the commands for about an hour I found that I could only get it to work if I used congrid on the image to resize it so that the kernels were compatible with the array. However, for some reason, somewhere in that process I kept losing the color. So right now I am able to use the low pass filtering, but it yields only black and white images, which defeats the entire purpose of the research. Hopefully Jake will have some words of wisdom for me when I go to the meeting in about 20 minutes, because I am at a loss of what to do next. On the brighter side, I got free pizza today for attending one of the undergraduate presentations on the research being done in the ultrasound lab. It was a little boring but worth it, and some of the research was interesting too. I hate to say it but Im already counting, 2 more days until the weekend!