Astronomy Internship - Day 41

I was actually pretty productive today. We've gotten our reddening estimate from the IR data as well as a preliminary distance modulus that agrees moderately well with values in the literature. There's still more work to do on accounting for various things, but we're coming along. The next step will be to use this information to give us insight into the UBVI data we'd previously gathered to help refine that, which is were our ultimate final answers will come from.

After work I headed off to Comic Con for day 1 of 4. It was a blast. The big event I hit tonight was the Star Wars Fan Film awards. I used to be fairly active on theforce.net's fan film message boards on which I virtually "met" several of the people winning awards and thus, got some priority in seating (was one of the first hundred in out of 3,000-4,000) and then got to chat with everyone afterwards. Among them was Steve Sansweet, the head of fan relations for Lucasfilm:



The highlight of the ceremony was the world premiere of the long anticipated "Return of Pink 5: Volume 2". The Pink 5 series has been a fan favourite for a few years now (See the original here, as well as Pink 5 Strikes Back and Return of Pink 5: Vol 1 here)

Unfortunately for everyone except those lucky few thousand, Volume 2 isn't going to be released for another few months. However, I also got to meet the lead actress, Amy Earhart.



Thus, I have secured bragging rights in nerd circles for years to come. The whole thing was a huge blast and a ton of laughs. I encourage anyone interested and needs a few laughs to get away from the oppressing insanity of the anti-science crowd to check out all the winners, as well as all the other entries here.

I'll be going back tomorrow for a lot more fun since my advisor gave me the day off to figure out exactly how we want to proceed from here.