Thursday, June 22, 2006

Astronomy Internship - Day 12

Today was our first day without any real supervision. When I woke up this morning, my advisor still hadn't replied to my Email asking whether I should continue using IRAF to reduce data, or if I should do as Dr. Sandquist recommended and use a stand alone program known as DAOPHOT. So I spent my morning continuing to read journal articles on the cluster in question.

After lunch, my advisor had finally relplied and told me to go with DAOPHOT. So I headed over to the astronomy building to find Dr. Sandquist. He photocopied the ~80 page manual for DAOPHOT and pointed out several sections I should become familiar with.

Once I got a binder to keep this rather large stack of papers in, I headed back to my room and read until dinner.

We learned at dinner that our tower is also being used by a cheerleading camp. Oh joy. The dining hall was filled with scores of chatty teens. Ew.

After dinner, four of us played some foosball and pool in the tower's game room. I managed to remain undefeated in foosball (3 team games and 1 solo 1v1), and won at pool (although only because my opponent put the 8-ball in the wrong pocket).

Once that was finished, I headed back to my room and did some more reading. About 9:00, I finally grew tired of that and played around on the internet for the rest of the night.

Tomorrow I'll hopefully be knowledgeable enough about this program to start processing data.

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