CM's+November+26

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Today I spent a brief period of time updating my logbook from last week.
 * November 25, 2007**

Today I updated my notes pages again. I am just about finished with Schroeder's paper. Writing notes has been helpful in refreshing my memory on the information in the paper. I also talked with CC and we got a pretty good handle on the main formula we have to use to find SFR. I understand it much better now, and this project is looking much friendlier than it did before. DL also helped us with the formula, and explained things from a calculus and physics background (both of these classes I have not taken...). CC added that formula and a brief explanation on our formulas page.
 * November 26, 2007**

Today I added an entry to my logbook. I also worked on my notes page more when DL pulled CC and I away to chat. We talked about the upcoming trip to Austin and everything that we will be responsible for before we head down there. We have to make a poster for the conference that will be presented the first night that we are there. I'm very excited for the trip! I also sent an e-mail to Dr. Rudnick today, because I realized that we had not been in touch for a few weeks. I gave him a brief update on what CC and I have been up to.
 * November 27, 2007**

DL also asked us today if we could start delving into the SFR excel spreadsheets from the project last year. It would be very helpful to us if we understood them by the end of the semester. After our talk, CC and I decided to start right away on the raw data. There are so many different parts of the spreadsheet that we didn't know where to begin. I must admit that I was a little intimidated. We finally decided to focus on the data from the cluster 1037. We took our time and went through every column and figured out what was done to each separate cell. It was actually not as hard as I thought it was going to be. I recorded all of the operations that were done. I understand what was done and why, thusfar, though I know that there is no way that I could calculate that data myself! We are planning on putting all of the directions from our spreadsheets into one powerpoint, so that we can refer back to it. This will also make it easy for others to see what went on in all of the different tables. Perhaps this would also be a helpful addition to our poster.
 * November 28, 2007**

Tonight I went to Notre Dame to acquire some knowledge of remote star observing. When I arrived, CN and MM were already looking at what I found out later to be an asteroid. It was huge! It kind of looked like the design on the middle of the New Mexico license plates...it was very neat to see! We took a few pictures of that object, and then we moved onto to look for some of CN's stars. CN was doing remote observing from a telescope in Arizona. I learned a lot about the different types of observing technology that can be used. We strictly used iBisque tonight, but I understand that Aladin and Simbad can also be of assistance with this sort of thing. We unfortunately were not able to find any of CN's stars. Apparently the software is very particular when it comes to how you type in the name of the object that you are looking for, which I guess I can understand, because there certainly is a lot to look out there. We weren't completely sure what to type in and where to type it, so that will probably just require some more familiarity with the program. We then looked at a sky chart and tried to figure out what exactly we were looking at. Some of the stars on the map resembled what we were looking at through the telescope, though we can't be sure that is what we observed. CN and MM were able to take a color picture of the asteroid, though. To my surprise, the color image turned out black-and-white, but I was informed that this is how it is supposed to look, when all three colors are mixed together! The image turned out really well, though! That was a cool thing to see and learn how to do!

Today in class, CC and I once again spent time looking at the spreadsheets. Since we were able to complete the analysis of one yesterday, we began a new one. It was very interesting to me to find out that we had very little work to do on this one, because all of the constants were the same as those that we had recorded yesterday. We just analyzed the same data, but from a different galaxy. We completed this one quickly because of this and started on the SFR data of the third and final galaxy. There are many more spreadsheets to look at though, in addition to these basic three. We also found a chart in one that showed how to type galaxies. We copied this and proceeded to verify the typings of the galaxies within the three clusters. They were all correct as far as we could see. We also figured out what each "typing" meant and seem to have a pretty good handle on that too.
 * November 29, 2007**

This is the last day of classes this week, but we plan to continue making sense of these spreadsheets all of next week. The following week we will work on assembling our poster. (And the next week is finals and then break! WOOHOO!) I wish that there was something visual that we had for everyone to look at what is going on in these spreadsheets, however, we want to get a good understanding of as many of the spreadsheets as we can first, so the graphic will is coming! We will hopefully be attaching another page to the Spitzer page with all of this information.

Tonight, I semi-updated my logbook. I still need to do the bulk of the entries for this week, but I did not have tons of time.

Today we got our Christmas tree!
 * December 1, 2007**

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