Nicole's Blog

Day 32

2008-08-20T09:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Day 25

2008-08-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

Wow, two more weeks left, I'm surprised at how fast this internship has gone by. The next two weeks will most likely be very busy with us typing up our posters and creating our power point presentations that I won't even notice when they are over. Most people ask me why I would want to spend my summer working 40 hours a week. In a way, today at the Louise Slaughter building where the undergraduates were doing all of their presentations, my question was answered when a man, whose name escapes me, reminded everyone why they were there. Sometime, somewhere in their lives everyone of those undergraduates decided that they cared about what they were researching (passion) and put in the hours and the effort, the hard work, all for what? In a way I didn't even need an answer for that question, it's the reason I go to school everyday, to run all year round instead of just for the season, it's why I continue to practice my clarinet throughout the summer. The satisfaction, the hard work gives an unbelievable high, it is why I continue to reach for my goals and be the best I can. Anyways, that doesn't mean I don't like to have fun, so, TGIF!
The presentations were fairly good, I thought the groups from the astronomical department were exceptionally good. I could see a lot of the undergrads do the same things they warn us about throughout high school like talking too fast when you get nervous, unnecessary pacing, and over-exaggerated hand movements. The undergrads in our department practiced yesterday (with us as their audience) and seemed very calm when they actually presented. When Brad and Bryan presented there were about three professors in the room who fired what sounded to me like really hard questions, they answered a few of them coolly and the ones they didn't know they simply told them that they could figure it out. I hope I can present just as well on the 22nd, which is only 2 weeks from now!!! haha, okay, I'm done, see ya!

Day 24

2008-08-07T13:40:00.000-07:00

Today I finished a bunch of last minute IDL excursions for the Undergraduates that have their symposium tomorrow. Lucky they have me, huh? Haha, well they know they wouldn't have gotten all those wonderful and colorful pictures if it weren't for us interns.
Other than that I have been working on my poster, again the only trouble I'm having is that I'm not sure how the scale is going to work out when they take it from a powerpoint slide and then make it 3 feet by 4 feet poster size. Jake said that I should take a ruler upstairs to check out the size of the other posters and figure out what kind of scaling I want. Too bad there aren't any rulers here... So I'm bringing one in tomorrow, and I will continue to piece together my poster.
Jake said that he and Stephanie talked about what us interns should do regarding the presentations we have to give on August 22nd. They suggested that we each do our presentations individually but all in a row so that they can tie into one another without talking for a full half-hour and losing the interest of our audience and without repeating things over and over again. I think it is generally a good idea, we just have to figure out how we're going to split it up. Another day... bye.

Day 23

2008-08-06T13:42:00.000-07:00

This morning I finished writing descriptions for all of my eroded image galaxies. I noticed that the ones I had written yesterday were not any longer than about two sentences only because there was not a lot of important details in the images. The ones that I finished writing about today had more detail and more things to write about and point out. After I finished that I put it up on the Wiki so that Jake could see it.
By the afternoon I started working on my poster that I have to make to put up back at my high-school to show everyone what I worked on during the summer. I'm not sure how everything is going to work out scale-wise, but I put three pictures on it, as well as wrote a little about what I've been doing, why I've been doing it, how I've been processing the images I have, and thanked those who helped me . I'll probably finish writing about the process some more tomorrow and then send it to Joe for some feedback, before I tell him that it's done. I haven't started working on the presentation yet, but I think that Kevin and I are going to be working on it together, because we've basically been doing the same thing since day one. There are a few differences between what we've been doing but we'll just present accordingly. The third to last week is almost over, I'll definitely have enough time to finish everything before the end of the internship. I'm sure Jake will have more work for me to do by tomorrow, if not I have enough work to do for now with the poster and the presentation, either way I'm golden. Until tomorrow!

Day 22

2008-08-05T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today was a long day of work. But in a way it was okay, I got a lot accomplished and am glad that I wasn't sitting here all day fiddling around with IDL. Actually I only used IDL for a few hours in the morning while I transferred all of my eroded images that were saved as tiff files into jpegs. I needed them to be jpegs so that I could put the images on a Microsoft Word document and describe each image separately. I went to the meeting at one o'clock with Jake and Stephanie and reported what I have been doing for the past week. They didn't give me anything else to do because I already have a task that I need to get done but I think I'll be done describing the images sometime tomorrow.
After the afternoon meeting I was able to write a description for the majority of my images. Tomorrow I will be able to finish them completely and see if my descriptions are sufficient enough for Jake. I described a lot of what data was what color for each galaxy. There are a couple images that I think will be kind of difficult to describe because they are not the "norm" where there is supposed to be a mix of optical (red) and UV (green and blue) data inside of a ring of optical data (red). Anyways, I just hope I can correctly describe them so I don't have to go back and do it all again, I only have about six left.
It's almost five, I've got a meeting and then a summer band concert to play in! I doubt anyone would read this in time to go but if you'd like 6:30 at the Henrietta Town Park (by the senior center). Wow, it's only Tuesday?

Day 21

2008-08-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today we took a trip to ITT and learned a little about what they do to create and design mirrors for telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra infrared telescope. It was interesting to see the amount of work they put in to each and every mirror they produce. They told us that they buy their beginning glass pieces from Cornell as well as produce their own. Each glass mirror they produce goes through an extensive process where they grind it down with tiles, and a liquid with grit in it, also using a "pitching process" by running the glass over a solution and tile that can be tilted a certain way to shape the glass any way they want. It was really interesting to see the process to create these great pieces of glass, and to see the amazing detail that went behind the designs. They will soon be taking on a major project of creating a mirror that is about 8 feet wide. They are creating it in sections that will make up the final piece. Too bad we can't get to see the finished project. It was interesting to see that ITT has so many different occupational people working on the mirrors such as: electrical and mechanical engineers as well as more specialized positions. All in all it was a fun trip but it did get a little warm dressed up from our hair nets to our booties in the lab that was sanitized, standing up with all those protective gear on made me feel a little light-headed, good thing we left soon after I started to feel that way.
After ITT, we went to DiBella's and got subs to go. We ate them up in one of the spare conference rooms and spent almost an hour just hanging out together for our lunchbreak, it was fun.
I went back to work, finished up my last eroded image from friday and then am going to be spending my time changing them to jpegs for further work.

Day 20

2008-08-01T12:47:00.000-07:00

This is the end of my 4th week as an intern here at RIT. I have another 3 to go but I'm thinking right now that they won't be too bad. This morning Bob was not here but Joe did bring us some yummy doughnuts, Thanks Joe. I also had to ask Joe what to do because somehow, yesterday I must've left my id card in my pocket and it must've fell out somewhere, and it is lost. Joe gave me the option of sending him my times everyday instead of buying another one, so for now I think I'm going to do that, if it's difficult then I'll probably just pay the fee to get another card.
Today, Tom and I used all of the information we have been collecting throughout the past couple weeks to finally erode the tiff files we saved!! Tom was able to write up a code so that we could both easily just input the code instead of going through the eroding process over and over again. I finished up all of my image except one, I need to go back and re-save the fits as a tiff, because somehow the pixel size of the fits, 882 by882, changed to 760 by 700 when I saved it as a tiff file. I need to see if I can redo it and fix it so it doesn't change and then erode it. Then I am officially done with this portion, well unless I have to do some other files, of eroding images!!! This has been a pretty good day, I need to post the images on Flickr and update the Wiki. At 4:30 we are going to an early meeting where we are going to hear the Journey of a Photon kids give their practice presentations on what they have been working on. Earlier I went to the IS&T meeting and heard about the Document Restoration Lab and what they have been acomplishing this summer. It was a really interesting meeting and I thought it would've been really cool to work on. It was intriguing to me, thinking of uncovering ancient history that no one has ever seen before.
I'm so glad it's Friday, I need more sleep, running five miles this morning wasn't nice to me today. Hopefully I don't forget anything over the weekend, I think I wrote it all down.

Day 19

2008-08-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

Today we went to the U of R to meet up with the interns that came to RIT yesterday and learn about what they were doing in their labs. When we got there I was surprised to be walking into a building that I have known since it was built. My mom works in the admissions department for the Medical students. When Dr. Pinto came and got us we walked right by her office, she isn't there this week because she is visiting family with my grandmother, but now I get to tease her that if she had been working I would've said hi to her.
When we went to the first couple of labs I wasn't too surprised to hear that the U of R did testing on animals. However, I was surprised at the quantity of animal testing at the U or R. One of the labs was using a rat brain for their study of epilepsy. Another lab actually showed us the process from live mouse to mouse brain for their study of certain cells in the brain. That was the worst, I'm not necessarily squeamish when it comes to dissecting things, I mean I have dissected a fetal pig, held and examined a sheep's heart, and even watched a live knee surgery, but I was certain that I would never want to have that job. I understand that to make things like killing a mouse easier, the people that do it are usually very humorous about it so as to not think of it badly. But the whole time the girl who was cutting the mouse open, flushing out its blood, separating its head from it's body, and then cutting open the skull to extract the brain was commenting on her favorite parts and how "fun" they were. I have nothing against her for doing the research, but my early thoughts of "Oh man, I wished they didn't just offer the biomedical internship to city school kids, I would've loved that!" changed to, "I'm glad I couldn't even apply for that internship, I like it just where I am". Haha, even though I am hoping on getting into the U of R for College, I'm very glad that the RIT internship didn't involve killing animals everyday for my research, I think I love my computer and the infamous IDL program now. I think that they are doing a wonderful job with their research over at the U of R and that they must be very dedicated to come back to it everyday for the past month. One lab was studying movement of the body and its effects on the neck and head muscles. Another lab was researching different ways to increase the cartilage between your bones without invasive surgery every ten years, again with animals, they used pig joints. Overall it was a good visit, I just don't ever want to see an unconscious anesthetized mouse getting cut open and it's blood being flushed out ever again.
After getting back from the U of R, Tom and I enlisted help from Jake who figured out how to display the tiff file data on IDL. YAY!! We can now read tiff files!!! Did some more reading of the IDL help, we can erode a black and white jpeg, read even more. Unfortunately, we still can't erode a tiff file... tomorrow is another day.

Day 18

2008-08-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

The U of R interns came to visit today, this morning, since I'm designated "timekeeper" I kept track of when we needed to meet up with them. There didn't seem to be too many of them but I was kind of nervous for when they would show up at our lab to learn about what we were doing. To get ready I signed into my Flickr photo account so that I could show them the images that I had already put together. Also while I was waiting I finished saving all of my data fits files as tiff files.
When the U of R interns showed up I didn't really say much because Tom and I are basically doing the same thing and he pretty much said it all. I was kind of disappointed I didn't input anything but I did have my images up so that they could see what we've been doing for the past three weeks. Someone asked Kevin what the bigger picture was according to the research that we are doing and I was so glad they didn't ask me. I probably would have told them that we were putting pictures together so that the undergraduates would be able to use them in their symposiums, but he came up with a better answer telling them about what the data in our images actually meant and what it could be used for. Brad, one of the undergrads also pitched in on explaining our research, it was great that he helped out.
For the rest of the day Tom and I spent our time trying to erode some of the tiff files we had just saved. For a trial run we tried to erode a jpeg file since Tom had done it once before. Unfortunately, when we went back and tried to erode a jpeg file again it was unsuccessful. This was a big step backwards because we thought that we were all ready to jump in and finish off our images. Wrong, back to the drawing board... How do you erode images in IDL?

Day 17

2008-07-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-28T13:32:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-22T13:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-17T13:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-16T18:08:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-10T13:39:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

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.