Monday, July 31, 2006

Astronomy Internship - Day 49

Today I was given a new task, and a tedious one at that. In order to have information about each star in all the different filters (UBVI from our data and JHK from 2MASS), we needed to match up the stars between data sets. A few stars in each were easy to identify, so Dr. Twarog worked up a coordinate transformation based on them. From there, she used that transformation on the 2MASS data to predict where the stars should be on our frame.

My task is to look at where the stars are supposed to be and see what's there. That way we can match up all the stars. It's not too difficult. Just very tiring. There's generally only one star that matches, but because our data set had so many more stars, there's a lot to sort through to find the matching ones. And there's about 550 stars to do this for.

No way I'm getting this done today. It will have to be a weekend project.

3 comments:

Stephen said...

Sounds like a job for a computer.

Jon Voisey said...

The computer made this task much easier than it otherwise would have been. We sorted everything by the X coordinate in descending order, so it was mostly a job of trimming the extra stars.

A computer probably could have done the job for us, but by the time we figured out a script, wrote it, and executed it, we could be done with it by hand.

Jon Voisey said...

The computer made this task much easier than it otherwise would have been. We sorted everything by the X coordinate in descending order, so it was mostly a job of trimming the extra stars.

A computer probably could have done the job for us, but by the time we figured out a script, wrote it, and executed it, we could be done with it by hand.