Astronomy Internship - Day 7

I woke up later than usual again today due to waking up at 4:00 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep for over an hour.

Breakfast was decent today as I got there in time to get a waffle.

As predicted, the morning session was laid back since we'd all finished our practical exercise from yesterday on finding magnitudes for a series of stars (photometry).

For lunch I hit the Panda Express here. Quite good.

The afternoon session consisted of a rather imprompteau lesson on how to do what's known as profile fit photometry which is required when the field of stars you're looking at is sufficiently dense that the images of stars begin to overlap. This lecture was quite good. The concepts for all of this is pretty easy, but eventually I'm going to need to get a more detailed description of the actual commands that IRAF uses since this profile fit photometry is what I'm going to be doing a lot of with the cluster I'll be looking at.

And just to prove that we actually do do some work, here's a few pictures:





Because I ended up not getting my full amount of sleep, I ended up relaxing this evening and read a book. Tomorrow will consist, in part, of reading through the literature I've printed out concerning the cluster I'll be analyzing first. So expect a post tomorrow with some information about cluster NGC 7142! Exciting.