July 29

Today I finally managed to save the JPEG files as TIFF files. The problem was that TIFF files have a weird way of cataloging the color data, and its even weirder to write and read them with IDL. Needless to say, Jake helped me figure it out. Apart from converting all of my hastrom files into TIFF files, we also had a meeting with Steffi to discuss our progress over the last two weeks. Other than that, I didn't really get anything else done today. It doesn't sound like much but it was a busy day.

July 28

Today was another frustrating day working with IDL. I spent much of the morning participating in Visual Perception experiments. After that I went to lunch and started actually working around two. I managed to erode the images in IDL, which allowed me to save them as JPEGs. Although this was significant progress from last week, I had a new problem. Apparently my images need to be saved in TIFF format, which cannot be converted from JPEG. So I needed to go back to my hastromed FITS files and put them back together. Then I needed to figure out how to save as TIFF files, which was also complicated. The problem I have now is that I cannot open the files, so I cannot run the eroding process, so I am stuck again. Hopefully tomorrow I will learn a little bit better how to manipulate TIFF files because right now everything I try to do is failing because it is all different from JPEGs and FITS files.

July 25

Today I figured out how to get rid of almost all the background interference in my images, sort of. I found this program called iImage that opens out of IDL and can run several different filter and morph functions. The erode function works particularly well to destroy noise. The only problem is that the only way this program saves the images is in a weird file type (not JPEG) that I cannot manipulate in IDL. So, I need to figure out the commands in IDL to do the erode function, which is not as easy as I thought. Hopefully, with a little of help from Jake, I will be able to get this to work and actually make some forward progress, otherwise I will have to look for yet another method! Oh well, atleast it is Friday!!!

July 24

I spent another day working to improve my hastrom images. Because IDL does not let you manipulate JPEGs with most filtering commands, I need to do the filtering to each layer of data as FITS files. I discovered several different techniques that I used in varying degrees and orders to try to reduce background noise. Most work well on the Optical, but because the UV is so scattered it is very difficult to separate the important data from the noise. Once I find the best way to do this, and get Jake's approval, I will begin writing a program that will go through the steps (there are many) so that I and the other interns can just run their galaxies through the program to refine their images without spending hours repeating commands. At least that is the plan right now, things often change around here. So yeah, I spent the day researching and fiddling with IDL, and have five or six potential products to show for it, hopefully Jake will like one of them...

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!

July 22

Today was our first field trip. We went to Bausch and Lomb where Mr. Powell showed us around. In addition to seeing one of the manufacturing lines for contact lenses, we got to go into a few of the labs that do work and research surrounding current developments in optics at B and L. Needless to say, it was a great opportunity for us to see the kinds of jobs we may be looking at as graduating BS and MS students. After the tour (which lasted until about noon) we went out for lunch, Joe's treat. Then returned to RIT around one for a half day of work. In that time I managed to figure out the source of my problems with the four remaining galaxies, and fix them. Now all the data from the 14 galaxies has been successfully compiled and my results are posted on flickr. Overall, it was a pretty good day. I got to spend the morning on a tour, and the afternoon successfully fixing all my problems from last week and yesterday!

July 21

Today was good as far as Mondays go. I used hastrom to overlay three galaxies of images early this morning and showed them to Jake. He approved of these (they turned out much better than the ones I had made using the Hubble images). So I spent basically the rest of the overlaying the Far UV, the Near UV, and the optical images of all but two of my galaxies. The digitized sky survey optical images appear to have worked much better and the results can be found on my flickr account, under the set hastrom. Tomorrow I will finish up the last two galaxies and try to figure out why a few of them brought up errors today ( like 3 of them didnt work and I dont know why ) Plus tomorrow is the Bausch and Lomb tour so that will be good. That pretty much says it all, except Kevin and I helped Joe Pow and Bob Callens move this table that was like 12 feet long down two stories... on the steps! And thats what I did today.

July 18

Today was much better than yesterday. Early in the morning I figured out how to use Hastrom to allign the far UV, near UV, and optical images. Although I now understand the process, my results were not quite what we had in mind. Because of the differences in the images between the telescopes the compiled images are either zoomed to far out to get good detail on the galaxy, or too close, where the UV images have very poor resolution. I spent much of the day trying to discover a better way to compile the images and testing them. I finally got to talk to Jake about and hour ago and he recommended trying to use the digitized sky survey images instead of the Hubble Telescope images. He also mentioned looking up some smoothing and un-sharp mask commands for IDL to help the detail of the images. The good news is that I already downloaded the digitized sky survey images, the bad news is that I have to start over again with these new images. At least I know what to do Monday next week!

July 17

Today was one of the more discouraging days of this internship. I am now working to overlay the Far UV, Near UV, and Optical Images of each galaxy. In order to do this, I need to use information from the header to make sure the alignment is exact. In order to use the header the files needed to be saved as FITS files, and I had saved all of my UV images as JPEGs. So I spent the day finding the galaxies in the big UV FITS files and saving the desired galaxies as FITS files, instead of JPEGs. Unfortunately, after hours of re-finding and reformatting galaxies, I realized that once you change a FITS file in any way shape or form, you lose the valuable information in the header. So basically, I spent the entire today doing something that did absolutely nothing to help get my work done. Tomorrow I will start in just about the same spot I started today, except with the knowledge that saving all the galaxies as reformatted FITS files is a terrible waste of time!!! Oh yeah, the word on the board from this morning ASTORIA which has some relevance to Carlson, the scientist for which this building is named for. But beyond that I am not really sure what it means, but it is on a plaque in the front lobby, so it must mean something.

July 16

Today I finished processing the optical images from the telescope, without any problems except for one galaxy which was too big so I had to change some of my UV data to correspond with the optical. After I posted all the optical images on Flickr, I didn't really have anything to do. As soon as Jake found out he sent me an email asking me to overlay the images that I collected from the far UV, near UV, and optical of each galaxy. I started to learn the process from Nicole and Kevin, but didn't really have enough time to make any significant progress. Tomorrow I will see if basically all the work I have done so far was accurate enough to make this next process possible, or bad enough to make it nearly impossible. Hopefully it is not the latter of the two! : )

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!

July 14

Ahhh Monday! Getting up this morning was more than difficult, but I made it through. This morning was a little slow. Our morning Astronomy meeting has been canceled because Jake has two classes to teach (at the same time) from 9 to 12. So that means that Jake is gone, and a few of the undergrad students as well, notably Greg who usually helps me when I get into trouble. The first problem of the morning was that the network was down because of the repairs made over the weekend. Once that came up I spent about and hour wrestling with IDL because the "pro" folder I loaded from Kevin didn't have all the files in it. After discovering my problem (greg discovered it) I spent the rest of the day pinpointing the galaxies and converting their close-ups into JPEGS. They are now posted on my Flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/28667018@N08/ Believe it or not, that took basically the entire day, but at least now I have some proof that I have been doing something around here!!

July 11

Another day in the Astro department has come and gone, almost. We started our morning with the intern meeting as usual, but Bob brought donuts so that helped wake me up. Then we had our morning astro meeting, which was the same as always, and went to work. After about five minutes though Bob came down and grabbed Kevin and I to help move this optical bench, which is really a big hunk of metal supported by two granite blocks. HEAVY!! But now it makes a nice display in the lobby of the Carlson building. After that I spent pretty much the entire day doing the same thing I did yesterday, except with the far UV images. So now i have two stacks of papers with pretty pictures of galaxies on them!! Monday I will probably turn them into JPEGS so I can post them online. So that was my day. Oh yeah, Bob and Joe wanted us to pick a job from the list in the hall assuming we had the necessary qualifications. I guess I would probably pick the Imaging scientist / engineer for Aptina Imaging because it would give me a chance to do some engineering (what I hope to go to college for) and work to improve the way digital cameras capture images, which is pretty cool and cutting edge. So yeah, that was my day, and soon I can leave and it will be the weekend. Life is good : )

July 10

Today was an interesting day. Our morning intern meeting was transformed into a quick example of how our eyes work. We turned the lights out in the room and allowed our pupils to dilate so we could see ( sort of ) in the dark, then covered one eye and went outside exposing the other eye to light, then back into the room. After that we could see with the eye that had been covered but not with the other. I am supposed to explain this phenomenon in my blog so here goes... when your eye is exposed to light the pupil contracts, reducing the amount of light entering the eye to avoid damage, however, when little light is present the pupil dilates to allow as much light in as possible. As a result, the uncovered eye contracted when we left the room and the covered eye remained dilated, so we could only see effectively with the dilated eye when we returned to the room. After that I spent basically the entire day viewing the images I downloaded and reformatted yesterday. For each one I had to find the galaxy of interest, highlight it and print both a close and far view of the galaxy. Then each printout had to be labeled with the correct image information, galaxy name, and exact coordinates within the image of the galaxy. Overall it was a pretty repetitive day and I am looking forward to Friday and the weekend.

July 9

Today was much busier than yesterday. I changed my focus from the sphere project in the 3D digital immersion lab to a project analyzing UV photos of galaxies. Because the main project with the sphere was to figure out how to project a good image onto it, and I do not have a good understanding of the technical programming involved in making this modification, I felt a little useless. So I talked to Jake about it and he was OK with me switching projects, at least for the time being. After that I spent most of the afternoon downloading the UV images of 20 galaxies from the Galex site. Four of the galaxies were missing, but the other 16 had good images so I downloaded those, which took a while. In the midst of that we had our daily coffee break, which was rather quiet, nobody really has a lot to say that early in the morning. I finished the downloads before we left for lunch around one. Then when we came back from the Crossroads I began reformatting the images so that I can work with them. Using the PuTTy unix app I untared all the images and then unzipped them, which sounds simple but is really rather time consuming because you have to do each galaxy one at a time. Now I am about to begin actually viewing and scaling the images, but chances are I wont get much headway before we have our meeting and leave. Tomorrow should prove to be a little more rewarding.

July 8

My second day at RIT is coming to a close. Im still adjusting but at least now it feels like I have something to do around here. I am officially working in the 3D digital immersion project. We got the big balloon in the mail today so my first task was to get that and blow it up. Then we built a stand out of PVC pipes to keep the 6 foot diameter sphere off the ground and from rolling around. That took most of the morning, along with the astronomy coffee break and lunch break. Then at two we had a team meeting about the 3D stuff, and showed the sphere and stand to Jake. After that we hooked up one of the projectors to try and see how good or bad the image was on the sphere. Its surprisingly good, except the edges which are really distorted, but with a little tampering with either the graphics card or the display program itself we should be able to make it project better. A few of the undergrad students are looking into the formulas and the programming necessary to make this thing work. At the very least it should be challenging. Well the lights just turned off in the room which means I have been sitting in front of this lap top too long, better get up and do something!!

Monday July 7

Today was the first day of my 7 week internship with the college of imaging science at RIT!! It was pretty much just a set up day. We learned how to clock in, set up our computer accounts, got a tour of the campus, and a tour of the Carlson Building. We also spent a bunch of time in the red barn doing team building activities, some were fun and others were just weird, but we got to know each other. Finally, we split up and the astronomy group met with Dr. Jake Noel Storr and we got our basic duties and jobs set up, along with some computer programs... I think my main project for the summer will be working with the 3D immersive environment, our as it is popularly known the "cube" Hopefully that will be fun, even though I don't really know how to program. Anyway, its nice to get the first day out of the way, maybe tomorrow I can actually start doing something of significance.