Day 32

I finally got my dust map image to display on IDL!!! yay! Okay well, I worked on my presentation for most of the day. This morning I managed to create four slides. Unfortunately, that was not going to last if I had to present for about 10 minutes. Today I spent most of my time embellishing the weak presentation that I had put together. Now it seems to be about seven slides but I have no idea what I'm actually going to be saying yet... uh-oh! hmmm.... going to have to put some thought into that one. Jake wants us to meet with him tomorrow (Wednesday) to go over our presentation. I also made a list of all of the galaxies that I need to go online to get wfpc or R-band wavelength data for. That way I can go online tomorrow and try to figure out how to get them off of the website that Grant gave me. Wings tonight... bye!

Day 31

Sorry this is late, just didn't get around to posting anything on Monday. I mostly worked on the Final Draft of my poster, gave it to Joe Pow and now it is going to be printed. I checked it over and over again for spelling and grammatical errors, I hope I didn't miss any...
I also started working some more with the dust maps that Jake wants me to make with H-band filter and R-band filter data that will show us how much dust the galaxy actually has in it. It seems like I'm having trouble displaying the image after I have composed the dust map and saved it with a header. I'm going to talk to Jake about why it won't display the image right.
I talked to the other Astronomy Group interns and we might be going to eat wings tonight with the rest of the Insight Lab, sounds like it'll be fun!

Day 30

Well , today I was able to revise my poster with feedback from Dr. Chris O'Dea. However, I was not able to do more than that because I have not gotten anymore feedback *hint hint* from anyone else. I talked more to Grant today and he helped Kevin and I with our struggle in shifting the color mapping images so that they matched within at the most 10 pixels or so. He also worked with me a little on why the nicmos images off of the website he gave me didn't work as well as the archive ones that he didn't have all of. He told me that the one galaxy that I was trying to color map didn't have quite as good as a circular dust collection as the first galaxy I did.
This morning AJ brought in doughnuts, he said that Bob gave him some money for them. They were pretty good, I was sooo full after eating just one!
We had teambuilding today, for once! It was great, we went over and got some snow from outside the ice rink and put some on top of Kevin's car. It was great! I can't wait to see his reaction!

Until tomorrow.

Day 29

This morning I got in pretty early. There was no morning intern meeting because Joe and Bob were not going to be there. I still went up there this morning to say good morning to some of the other interns and wait until about 8:45 to go downstairs to work.
I attempted to work on color mapping with some of the files that Grant gave me, I practiced on a couple of the files that he already had a color map image for. After many unsuccessful tries I finally got the right combination and was able to recreate his color map image. I then went up again to show Grant my success and to ask him how to obtain the wfpc images. I need to talk to him today at the 5 o'clock meeting because the images nicmos images he told me to use instead of the ones on the archive look worse than the ones from the archive. We'll see how it goes. I didn't work on my poster at all today but I hoping to get more feedback tomorrow. Today was just in general a slow day...

Day 28

Today we went to Optimax for a field trip. Now, just like all the other companies we are technically not "allowed" to share any secrets. I know that in past blogs I have disregarded this request but shared limited information. However, because I don't have much to write about today nor do I have the ambition to write a full page about my trip and also because I liked the way we were welcomed at Optimax, I will not be writing about my trip in fear that I may say something that was considered secret. I can tell you that the people at Optimax were very nice and that I think because overall their work atmosphere was very casual and friendly.
On the way home where to my dismay we stopped at Amiel's instead of Dibella's. Not that I don't like Amiel's it's just that Dibella's is better. However, I must give credit where credit is due, Thank you Joe, for buying us lunch today, it was still good and very filling, that's all that matters.
I didn't get a lot done besides sending my poster to Dr. Jake Noel-Storr, Dr. Stefi Baum, and Dr. Chris O'Dea so they could give me some feedback on it for improvements. I also obtained a lot more work to do. So I've got a lot to do for the rest of the week, I won't be doing nothing here!

Day 27

Again, my poster took most of my time today as I tried to perfect it. I added in a few more pictures to fully cover the extent to which I worked with images during this internship. I also wrote more in detail about one of the most important processes that we used to filter the images I got from GALEX. I posted my earlier rough draft on the Wiki but I will be adding another one that is the most recent "final" rough draft. I will also send the rough draft to Joe Pow so that he can look over it and give me some feedback. Brad, one of the undergraduates, also proofread some of my poster and helped me with some of the details that I could include about the near and far UV images. I took some of his advice and added to, as well as, deleted some of the things that weren't so clear in my writing. I had a meeting today at one where we informed Jake and Chris O'Dea about what we've been doing for the past week. Jake mentioned that he has more work for us to do before we get too far into our posters and presentations. He said that the undergraduates had a few color mapping things that they needed us to do for them alongside our other work. It shouldn't be difficult it just means that we can't ignore the work that we have to do within the last two weeks. It's the last stretch, where you have to bring out everything you've got for the end, I know all about the last stretch. It's in those last 600 meters that you have to give a race the best you've got to make anything you accomplished earlier worthwhile.

Day 26

Today I transferred everything I had made for my poster from the PowerPoint slide onto a poster sized Publisher page. Hopefully it will work out better size-wise and the scaling will look feasible. I didn't really do much else than work on the poster today. Stephi did come down earlier and introduce a new person to the Astronomical Department. While she walked around looking at what we were working on she did mention to us interns to not put too many words on our posters or they would seem uninteresting to others. I don't think I've ever had too many words on my poster, but I will continue to spruce it up because right now it looks pretty barren. Maybe a few more pictures would make it look nicer and I have to think about how I'm going to group the information that I would like to incorporate into my poster. Just slowly adding more and more to my poster it's due by Wednesday, I'll definitely have it finished by then.