Day 17

I am relatively happy with the amount of work that I accomplished throughout the day. When Bob came in earlier today and asked us how IDL was working out, I figured that the rest of the astronomical imaging interns must have written about how unhelpful IDL was in their blogs as well. This morning we weren't very optimistic about what the day would hold after we were stumped for the past two days on how to save fits files as tiff files and then view these files. We managed to open a few of the tiff files we saved yesterday and realized that they were either, all red, all blue, or black and white, not the type of RGB images we were expecting. After lunch we went to the meeting with Stephanie and Jake and showed the the work we had completed thus far. I explained how the tiff files I had saved where not in color and was given some advice on what to do next. About a half-hour after we had left the meeting and gone back to work Jake came down to assist Tom and I with the tiff files. It was a little trying even for Jake but he finally found the chain of commands that we needed. I have saved approximately half of my galaxy images as tiff files and will continue this work tomorrow. When I am finished with that I will continue to drool over the IDL help manual to figure out how to read a tiff file on IDL so that we can begin a process called eroding that will make the images softer and less pixelated. Tomorrow the U of R interns are coming over to get a tour of our labs to learn a little more about what we actually do here. I don't use any fancy equipment so I guess the best I can show them is the images I have on Flickr and explain how I've used the infamous IDL to create them. I'm sure my blog tomorrow will include more about the actual tour from the astronomical department. When this internship is over I'm absolutely positive that I will not miss IDL, not even a little bit. ^_^