My summer vacation

In 42 hours, I'll be hopping on a plane, on my way to San Diego for the rest of the summer. The reason for this is an internship I've been awarded through San Diego State University.

I applied for it and was accepted back in March, but just found out what exactly I'm going to be doing last night.

The first part of the program will be learning to use a program called IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility). Then I'll be using this program to process a series of images taken of open cluster NGC 7142:



I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to be looking for, but have a feeling it's going to be variable stars since that's the big thing to do with clusters.

If I finish all that, and things work out well, I may be getting to go on an observing run to aquire more images of another open cluster, NGC 6791:



Then I'll have another fun time reducing the data and figuring out what it all means.

I'll be attempting to update this blog frequently to give everyone a bit of insight into the life of an astronomer as well as my usual rants.