Astronomy Internship - Day 45

Groggy as hell today. My sleep schedule is waaay off thanks to the con. I didn't wake up till almost 11:00 California time. And when I say "woke up" that only refers to my body. My brain stayed in that fuzzy world of half asleep-ness for the rest of the day. Thus, I wasn't terribly productive. My first task for the day was to make light curves from the 21 variable star candidates I'd picked out. However, as soon as my brain cleared enough to do this, we were kicked out of the lab because an astronomy class needed to use it.

So instead, Dr Sandquist gave a cheery little talk on the difficulties in pursuing a career in Astronomy, applying for grad school, surviving it, and then having years of post-doc before hopefully landing a perminant position somewhere. It was both terrifying yet reassuring because I have some to realize that of the 4 professors there, only one didn't have some sort of academic difficulties as an undergrad. Thus, I don't feel too discourage for my troubles.

I eventually did get the light curves made tonight. However, looking over them, none of them look like especailly good candidates based on what pieces of the light curve we have. I also noticed that our candidates don't include the variable star identified in the Crinklaw & Talbert paper. However, it looked to possibly be an eclipsing binary, so it's entirely possible we just didn't catch it at the right time.