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. ^_^

Day 16

Another day where very little was accomplished, although, not because I didn't try. The process through IDL was long, boring, and very very frustrating. Tom and I managed to slowly figure out how to save a fits file as a tiff file. When we finally figured that out we got stuck on trying to figure out if it saved it correctly, in color. Our only problem now is opening the tiff file to see if it saved them correctly. I have tried so many different versions of the command "read_tiff" that I can't think of any versions that I haven't tried. I don't really have much to say besides that I'm tired... Yeah, until tomorrow.

Day 15

I'm leaving early today but that still does not excuse me from my duties of blog writing. Today I spent my time trying to filter my galaxy images, again, the same thing that I have been working on for the past three days. Tom seems to have a lead but cannot seem to save it, and I have taken Jake's advice and gone down a different path. I looked up a new program called ImageJ and had Zosimo install it for me. I haven't gotten to use it yet but I am hoping that it is the exact program that I have been looking for to filter my images and improve their quality. Fridays are definitely different when it comes to the astronomical lab. I think we've gotten used to working with eachother and are starting to have a little fun with it, even though sometimes we feel like throwing the computer out the window. Just taking it one step at a time is a little difficult, at the moment I can't see where my efforts are taking me but I hope that I will be able to see the finished images soon...right after I figure out how to actually filter them. I'm trying my best, maybe next week. Wish me luck.

Day 14

Yet again, nothing accomplished besides what not to do when trying to filter an image in IDL. So I think Tom and I have pretty much run out of ideas, we're going to see what Jake has to say about it at the meeting tonight. The few times I actually gotten the filtering command to "work" I ended up with a mostly black image except for one white dot that was a very tiny portion of the image. Which resembled the original image of the galaxy in no way shape or form. Right now, I have no idea what I'm going to do, I just keep trying different forms of the code and reading more of the IDL help searching for an answer that hasn't shown up yet.

I may not have accomplished anything but I did get to run up to the roof when the Thunderbirds were flying around and watch them practice their drills. It was extremely cool, too bad I won't be here for the Air Show this weekend. Sorry, I don't have much to write about today, maybe tomorrow.

Day 13

Well, today was sort of a slow day. Technically I did not accomplish much, let alone anything worthwhile, but in my opinion I tried a lot of what not to do when trying to improve a jpeg image in IDL. Tom and I successfully got the program to smooth the image so it didn't appear so pixelated, but it just looked fuzzy and out of focus so that wasn't what we wanted. Therefore, to fix the problem we both spent the rest of the day looking through IDL help and trying to improve the quality of our images. Unsuccessfully we tried command after command until the end of the day. Tom had figured out how to "low pass filter" an image, but it had to be black-and-white, which is not very convenient for us when we want to filter images in color. At the meeting at 5 we'll probably ask Jake what he thinks and then try something else tomorrow. I hope we can figure it out, I think I'm tired of the syntax errors, if it works I won't have to demolish the computer. Wish me luck!

Day 12

This morning we went to Bausch and Lomb for a tour. We were told not to reveal any trade secrets but I will try my best to give you details without getting in trouble. Bausch and Lomb specializes in designing and manufacturing contact lenses. Contact lenses have come a long way in the past 10 years because they have developed a material that will allow oxygen to pass through it just like water. They needed to be able to create a special material like this because the cornea of the eye does not have any blood vessels that bring oxygen to it. Bausch and Lomb created a permeable material for their contact lenses and has a completely sterilized system of machines that makes the lenses. In order to tour their facilities we had to wear gowns, hairnets, ear plugs, and wash our hands before walking into the room with all the machines. We weren't in that room for a large amount of time, thank goodness, because then we could take off the gowns and everything. They showed us a room where they tinker with different cameras and lenses and lighting and they showed us some really expensive lights that could distribute the light they emitted differently. We moved on into a room that looked sort of like an eye doctor's office. In a sense it was, but technically it was a research facility, in the middle of the room they had two machines. The first machine measured the "elevations" on the eye, comparing it to a "normal" eye (because they all generally have the same shape). We thanked them for giving us a tour and proceeded back to RIT. However, we did make a pit stop for lunch, then went back to work. When we got back, Tom, Kevin, Basma, and I went to the meeting that had already started and listened to Jake tell some of the Undergrads how to work with their program. All the standing and walking at Bausch and Lomb made me exhausted and I was practically ready to fall asleep, after the meeting we went back downstairs and I finished combining the rest of my UV and Optical images which you can look at by clicking the link that was on Day 10 of my blog. It's time for our 5 o'clock meeting and then I'm going home to sleep. Bye!

Day 11

Today in work I downloaded all of the optical images of the galaxies I used in infrared hoping to get a better image when I put the optical on top of the ultra-violet images. I downloaded the optical images off of the DSS website, and then transferred them over to my folder so that I could work with them. I worked with the same process as I did on Friday except this time setting the UV image headers to the Optical image headers to get three 530 by 530 pixel images for each galaxy. There was one that was 882 by 882 but because I caught it before I could make a mistake I just substituted 882 in for 530 when I put in the window parameters. I completed 10 images and saved them as jpegs and put them on my flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28479835@N05/sets/72157606300913627/

Before our 5 o'clock meeting I'm going to see if I can download a few more optical images. I won't be able to work with them today but I can at least get them in my folder for tomorrow.

Day 10

Well, this is the end of my second week as an intern. Honestly, I can say that I'm exhausted! between trying to find time in the morning to run a few miles before coming in to work and then working for 8 hours everyday is not an easy task. So today, Kevin taught Tom and I how to set the headers of the UV data and the Infrared data to each other. It was so much easier than what I was trying to do yesterday, the Hastrom program sets both images to the same resolution, the same size, and rotates them so that they all match up perfectly. I finished the 11 images that I had but unfortunately, because the images are really close up to the galaxy the pixels are a little fuzzy and the images aren't that great. Brad, one of the undergrads, joked saying that it was great modern art. He's right, that's kind of what it looks like, if you don't believe me check it out for yourself:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28479835@N05/sets/72157606241957031/

Anyways, when I showed Jake what happened he said that I should try going online and find the optical images of the galaxies instead of the infrared. He wants me to keep the Infrared/UV images up on Flickr but he really wants me to try to do the same thing with the optical images instead of the Infrared. I haven't downloaded any of the images yet but I can do that next week and hopefully start the process all over again with little problems in IDL. I also helped Zach, a pre-freshman who just started working in the lab earlier this week, he needed a couple folders with information that would allow him to use IDL and he also needed Basma's images that she's been working on so we transferred those as well. A downfall of the day was that we didn't have a team-building activity today, it was supposed to be Ultimate Frisbee, but they are using the "Ultimate Frisbee" field as a construction site at the moment. Oh and Bob Callens talked to Kevin about how long we work because I guess we went over 40 hours (I didn't because I left early on Friday, but I guess I'll have over 40 hours this week). The internship program only has enough money to fund us interns to work 40 hours a week and nothing more, Bob is going to talk to Jake about having our 5 o'clock meeting sooner so we can leave earlier (therefore not exceeding 40 hours). The interns in the other labs leave earlier than we do most of the time, no wonder we went over 40 hours... Well, I guess we'll have to see what happens next week.

Oh and thank-you Bob for bringing in the doughnuts again.

Day 9

This morning Bob Callens gave us the letters "I S O T A R A" and told us that it was a scrambled word that we needed to write about in our blog. Before we even separated and went to our separate labs Gary, another intern, unscrambled it, the word was Astoria. When we got to the astronomical lab, us interns were looking Astoria up online. The most we found was that it was indeed a city in Oregon and New York. I also discovered that the Museum of the Moving Image is located in Astoria, New York. I took a quick walk around the first floor, the floor my lab is on, and happened to be distracted by the name Astoria. It turns out the dedication plaque for the building has an image of Chester F. Carlson, the man whom for the Science Imaging building is named, holding what looks like a piece of paper that says "10.22.-38 Astoria." I realized just before writing this blog that in actuality I do not know why Astoria is significant, possibly because Carlson may have been from Astoria, I'm not sure. However, Carlson is a significant figure because he invented xerography, from his discovery and dedication he influenced the world of Imaging Science.

Today in my lab I did not get a whole lot done only because the process I was using wasn't working in the IDL program. Most of my time was spent guessing and checking different possible ways to resize my UV images to be the same size as my infrared ones. When I finally got it to work, they looked nothing alike. By the end of the day Jake helped Kevin and I out a bit by telling us how to use another program called HASTROM. Kevin knows how to use it better than I do right now but I'm hoping to catch on tomorrow when we actually have time to work on it straight through because we can't save it until we're done. I taught Basma how to put color into her images as well since Kevin was working on the HASTROM program, I think his job was harder, but Basma was able to make her different images colorful and save them together alright. It's kind of nice that we're all working on some of the same things, but most of the time we're working something that someone else was working on yesterday so we're always asking each other questions. Not necessarily a bad thing but I do feel kind of bad because I was bothering Tom a lot because I did not completely understand how to use the congrid process to magnify my image in IDL. Hope tomorrow isn't too difficult, Hey, by the way, Kevin just got one of his images all compiled!!! YAY! that means that the sun is slowly coming out and I might be able to actually get some work completed that means something tomorrow. Until then.

Day 8

Well today I knew that I would be doing a lot of resizing. I realized yesterday that I had made a few mistakes when putting together the UV data images because I had not made them all the same number of pixels lengthwise and widthwise. I fixed my mistakes and went on to try to work with the infrared images I have. Brad explained that I needed to resize the infrared images so that it had the same number of pixels across and down as the UV images so that I could later place them on top of the UV ones. Tom helped me figure out how to resize the images according to the size parameters and such. By the end of the day I got the hang of it but was a little crushed to find out that because my infrared images were magnified so much Jake said not to resize the infrared images but only to resize the UV ones to fit the infrared ones. Tomorrow I have to go back to all of the individual fits files of the images resize them, save them as fits files again, then pull up the three images, far UV data, near UV data, and the visible infrared data, put each in a different color and place them all on top of one another and save it as a jpeg. Oh and there is some other part about setting their headers equal to each other, which is basically all the data of the images' dimensions, pixels, and whatnot. I think that's what I have to do, or at least that's how it's supposed to work, I'm sure I'll come up upon some problem where it won't work and I'll be down a completely different path tomorrow to get... well I don't know exactly what the end product is, but I guess when I'm done I'll find out, unless they have more work for me to do with these images, I already have a couple that I think will turn out really great. I feel like I've worked a lot today, even though technically I didn't get much done, I guess it's just because I must've tried almost 5 different ways to accomplish what I'm supposed to do and everytime I get thrown down a different path that says I need to do something else to achieve that one goal.

Day 7

Remember that trouble I was talking about with resizing the images I got from Karla? Well, it's looking troublesome but I up until now I haven't really gotten to talk to Jake about it. I went to the 1 o'clock meeting where we met Stephanie, who basically manages everything in the astronomical department and her husband, Chris O'Dea who is just as much my boss as Jake is. In the meeting we had to report on what we have been working on and if we came upon any problems to ask about them. I told them how I had been working on overlaying the UV images but was having trouble with the infrared images because the resolution of the two different types of images was not the same. After talking about it I came out just a little more confused about what I was actually supposed to do but I used another program they had suggested and asked Brad, an undergraduate, the best way to learn about the camera that had taken the images. His best advice was to look online and try to find the system and the specific camera that took the images and find the resolution it takes those images at. A few hours of internet meandering and pages of reading later I found that the resolution was .1 arcsec. The resolution of my UV images is 1.5 arcsec. That means that I have a lot of careful resizing to do now... if only I knew how...

Day 6

Came to work to find out that we are no longer having any morning meetings because Jake is teaching a class in the morning and cannot attend our morning debriefing. The undergraduates that are helping us out were also teaching classes in the morning so there wasn't much work that got done only because I kept getting errors. The hardest part about idl is that if you type in a command and forget to put in maybe one comma, it will give you an error and the program won't do what you want it to. So I spent the morning trying al different ways of putting things in and rearranged the syntax of the command with no such luck. I also spent the rest of the day gathering infrared data from Karla, another undergraduate working with the astronomical imaging group. She hadn't gotten a chance to resize any of the images yet, which pretty much means that I'll have to do that in order to work any further with them. I did manage to open up one of the images but unfortunately it is a larger image than the UV images I have. I think I'm going to have a LOT of trouble with getting the different types of images of the same galaxy match perfectly over one another.

Day 5

So, I'm late posting this late but I went away for the weekend and was stumped on what to put in here. Bob and Joe asked us to go to the Student Opportunities Board and choose a job that we would be interested in. Looking through everyone else's blogs I hoped that I would find something that I could say, "hey I felt that way too about that job!" Much to my dismay, I still have to write this blog and I cannot say that anything jumped out at me. I'm sure I would be great if the job had math, and I'm interested in science. However, I don't think I've connected to the imaging part of science, it's interesting and by no means is it boring, but I guess so far, I don't feel like it's my "thing." Looking at the job I'm planning on going into, a Medical Lab Technologist, an occupation in imaging science would be very different. So for this blog I don't really have anything to say about the Student Opportunities board, except the one in California looks good because the weather is the exact opposite of the freezing winters we have up here in New York. Although I would love the weather my dad has been telling me that California will slip off into the ocean since I was seven, when I told him I wanted to move there.

Besides struggling with that question, I finished adding color to all of my UV images, sent them to the undergrad who was writing up a newsletter about the work we did during the week, and then posted them on the flickr account that I created.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28479835@N05/

Oh by the way that also means I have another account to keep track of. yay! heh. Not really. I left early but finished a fair amount of work in half the time I would have normally been here.

Fourth Day

As the fourth day comes to a close I must tell you of the activity that we did this morning because I was asked to write about what happened. During our 8:45 morning staff meeting we were asked to sit in a dark room and let our eyes get accustomed to the light for a few minutes and then we were asked to try to walk around the table in the middle of the room. Honestly, it was kind of difficult only because my eyes hadn't necessarily gotten accustomed to having no light, I ran into a few chairs. We were then asked to walk out of the room and around the 2nd floor with one eye covered and the other uncovered. After this, we were then told to go back into the dark room and asked to look out of both eyes and walk around the same table as earlier. While walking around I noticed that the eye I had covered while out in the hallway was able to assist me in the dark room because it was so dilated and the other eye was unable to see anything at all. It a strange feeling because the pupil of the eye that was uncovered contracted, letting in less light, while we were out in the hallway so that when we were in the dark room again all I saw was blackness. Our eyes adjust to the light settings around us so that we can see clearly, or as clearly as possible.

So on to the rest of my day, since all of my files finished copying I was finally able to work on putting color into the images of galaxies. The problem I had from yesterday with being able to save was a challenge for most of the day. We figured out relatively what the idl command was supposed to look like to save a color jpg image but we couldn't figure out exactly how it was supposed to look. After almost 3 hours we caved and asked Jake, my boss, and he told us the configuration of the command. Up until now I was able to finish a little more than half of my images and put them into color. Tomorrow I will be able to finish them and then start whatever else comes next. On to another day...

Third Day

It's almost the end of my third day in this internship and yet again it's taking forever for the files to copy over into my folder now. While it was creeping along this morning all of the computers in the lab decided that they needed an update and were going to shut-down within five minutes. When we got back from our "coffee" break where barely anyone drinks coffee the computer had logged off and I had to start back from earlier this morning with copying files from the desktop to my folder. In my exuberant amount of spare time I read more about idl and took notes of important things I thought I'd need for adding color to the images. Things got better as the day went on because although I couldn't work with Greg's data to create color in the images I was able to work with Kevin, another intern who is working on the same project but with star clusters instead of galaxies. We spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to put color in the images, and what codes to use in the idl program. When we finally figured out how to create an image that had some color to it we ran across a little problem like saving it with no convenient save button. Well, it's now 4:40 pm and my computer has just finished copying the files that I need!!! I can't really work on much only because I have to go to a meeting on the third floor at 5 but hey, it's finally done!!! So, I'm going to finish up this blog and hopefully have more to talk about tomorrow seeing how I'll be able to work with the files instead of occupy myself while they copy in their own sweet time. Which means that tomorrow you might have more to read about my life as an intern, until then, see ya.

Second Day

So today was pretty laid back, after having our morning meeting at 9, us interns got together with the undergrad students who would be working with us and sharing their research. A lot of my day was spent copying Greg's (the undergraduate who I'll be learning from) files onto the desktop in hopes of copying them to my folder so I can use them. Although I didn't really get to accomplish a whole lot because the computer spent the day copying the files, I did get to read up on idl, or interactive data language. It's basically a program that I will be using for the next couple of weeks to display images of galaxies and modify the images by combining different color schemes. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be done copying the files and then I can transfer them to my folder and actually start learning how to use the program.

My other job is the Timekeeper, so I make sure that everyone checks the time and isn't late to their meetings. Everyday we have an 11 o'clock coffee break. On Tuesdays the digital imaging group has a meeting from 1-2 and then the digital immersion group (the cube group) has a meeting from 2-3. I'm still trying to figure out when everything is happening but I think I'm getting the hang of it, should think of making an hourly calender.

Mostly I'm just occupying myself and helping out here and there while I wait for everything to copy and then I'm hoping that I'll be able to create some beautiful images of some galaxies.

First Day

So the first day is almost over and it was well... it was interesting. We learned a lot about the different aspects of the Science Imaging Center at our morning staff meeting and then headed over to the Red Barn. The activities were fun and we got to spend time with some of the other interns while getting to know them. Two hours of team-building activities was just enough for the day but definitely an uplifting part of the morning, there were laughs. After being at the Red Barn some of the RIT students took us around the campus and showed us some of the buildings. It was nice to see it, but a little long for a tour and it was just only about 80 degrees outside. Other than the weather it was nice to see the rest of the campus because most of our internship will be spent in our little world of the Science imaging center. When we finally got to meet our advisor for the astronomical imaging portion of the Science Center, we were sent to interview some of the students who we will be working with and get to know more about what they are doing for research. Soon after we were able to decide, relatively, what jobs/projects we would be the most interested in doing during the course of our internship. I will be doing work with compiling images from satellites and also fufilling the role of "Timekeeper." The timekeeper is a new job and this person gets to remind everyone of the meetings that are coming up and remind everyone that they are expected to come. Working with the xming program was difficult but hopefully I'll get the hang of it, sooner or later. Overall, the first day was tiresome, but I was kind of nervous and I am hoping that tomorrow will be a better day only because I will be a little more comfortable. I am looking forward to working in the astronomical department and really hope to learn some exciting new things.