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!

August 11

Another Monday at RIT. Today I worked more on my poster, its almost done, I just need to read it through a few more times. Hopefully Im done changing pictures and font sizes and stuff though. I also compiled the different imaging processes and data collections that I did for the different galaxies so that Jake and Steffi can see the sum total of my work here this summer, and direct me in any further analysis for the next two weeks. That was about it, so kind of a slow day. Posters are due Wednesday and the presentations are due a weeks after that so its getting close to the end!

August 8

Today was the undergraduate research symposium. So what that meant for us interns was a free breakfast, a bunch of time looking at posters, and sitting through a few presentations, of varying degrees of interest. Both Brad Greg and Brian's, and Karla's presentations were very good, especially because I had helped a little with some of Brad Greg and Brian's stuff and some of my images were in their presentation. That took up most of the day, and right now all the undergrads are sitting through the presentation of awards for the symposium so there is no afternoon meeting. I did get to spend a little time on my poster though, which is starting to look pretty good actually, the only problem is I am having trouble making sure the text isn't too big or too small. Next week Ill finish it up and start working out my presentation.

August 7

Today I worked more on my poster. I did most of the text for how I did things and what I did this summer. Plus I added more images of the different steps, including the separate image arrays that I put together to make the hastrom images. Other than that I helped contribute a few things (images and such) to the undergrad's presentation that they have to give tomorrow and watched them do a practice run. Not a very eventful day, hopefully I will finish the poster design tomorrow.

August 6

Today was a pretty problem free day. This morning I reformatted the TIFF files that I created and made them JPEG (in IDL as usual). Then I put those JPEGs into a word document and highlighted and described the points of interest in each image. After that I was pretty much done with everything Jake could come up with for a while. So I decided to start working on my poster that covers the stuff I have done at RIT this summer. There isn't much more I can say about that so, yeah, thats what I did today. I should probably start working on the capstone presentation powerpoint some time soon as well. Maybe tomorrow.

August 5

Today was another good day in the RIT astronomical imaging department. I re-hastromed all my galaxies so that the optical were sized to the UV images, not the other way around. Then I was able to use the code that Brad developed to create surface brightness profiles of all my galaxies. The code was big and complicated and took some adjustments quite often, but it actually made the work a lot easier than it would have been to do it by hand. Anyway, that took the entire day, but it was good stuff. Hopefully I will have time to post the JPEGs of my histograms from todays work on Flickr before the afternoon meeting, but if not, they will be up tomorrow, I promise, I hope. If it wasn't raining outside, and my car wasn't parked in the farthest parking lot because of the construction, I would probably be in an excellent mood, but oh well, guess you can't always get what you want.

August 4

Today we went on another field trip. We got a tour of ITT, specifically its optics labs. There we saw everything from the machines used to grind precision lenses and mirrors, to the special rooms they use to test them, to some of the designs for mounting these lenses and mirrors inside telescopes. I think the coolest part was the machine that uses water to cut glass down to hundreths of an inch in thickness. After ITT we got free lunch on the way back to RIT and then had about three hours of work. I tried to run Brads code for finding the surface brightness profile of elliptical galaxies on my galaxies but it failed. To make it work I need to go back and hastrom my optical images to the UV instead of hastroming them to the optical (which is what I needed to do before). This will be easy, I hope, but none-the-less time consuming. Basma and I also spent some time with Meghan working on the insight lab's T-shirt design.

August 1

Today was my most productive day in over a week, and its Friday, so I'm in a good mood!! Early this morning I tested and figured out how to erode the TIFF files. However, as I expected, it needed to be done one array at a time, and was a fairly long process. To repeat this process three times, for each of my 14 galaxies would have probably taken the next three days, and would have been tremendously tedious. Instead I wrote a short code that does the process for me. After finishing my code it took under an hour to run all my images through it, and they are now posted on Flickr. Plus, Nicole was able to use the code for her images as well, so it was a huge time saver. Plus we got free pizza again for the IS&T meeting today. All in all it was a good end to a frustrating week.

July 31

This morning we went to the U of R to tour the labs of the interns that toured our labs yesterday. A lot of their research seemed really interesting and applicable. I thought the lab where they are attempting to connect artificial neurons to natural neurons was especially interesting. I also learned that when I stand in a small room that smells like mouse and watch an intern rip the heart out of a living mouse, cut its head off, and remove its brain, I pass out!! Or at least I almost did. I suppose I am fortunate to be working in astronomy and not a bio-engineering lab. Again we got free pizza, which is great because I am almost out of cash. After returning to RIT, I learned a better way to read TIFF files from Jake. Unfortunately, this did not solve the eroding problem that I had been having, so I still need to do it one array at a time. I tried it with one today and it worked, the challenge will be reintroducing the color and recompiling the images.

July 30

Today was another day full of experimentation in IDL. In the morning the Bio-engineering interns from the U of R came over and toured our labs to see what we have been doing. Then we got free lunch, pizza! Throughout the afternoon I worked on the eroding commands, just on a JPEG because I knew I had gotten it to work before. I finally figured out how to erode effectively, unfortunately it only works in the gray scale, and when I change the color table, it leaves me with either almost no information, or a really bright low resolution image that barely resembles my original. Fortunately, I think I am going to have to erode each array (R,G,B) separately in each TIFF file, so it wont really matter if they are gray scale because I can reintroduce color as I put them back together. Hopefully that works.