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Monday, December 3rd, 2007
Today, we received emails regarding the final exam (which is a milestone progress report to be done before the day of the final) and talked about what it will be like. I helped JV upload the pictures from our recent trip to Jordan Hall onto her computer so that she, being an Astroimager, can work with them. SG and I were also given a project idea: we are to use information about occultations with Ceres to detect the size, and possibly the speed. We already know the speed and size, so we can use that answer and work backwards in the equation to discover how we figure it out.

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
TL and I downloaded the Occult Watcher program again and tried to run it, but it didn't work so we had to log onto the Administrator user name and downloaded the program again and ran it. I entered the coordinates for south bend and ran the synchronizer to see what asteroids were being occulted around us. There was one, so I checked the weather and it is going to snow around here, so observing doesn't sem very likely. I also am planning on entereing the coordinates of New Mexico to see if I can observe the asteroid with the help of the New Mexico Observatory. SG wrote up some questions that we can do for our Milestone Report, also.

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
Today I tried to get the coordinates for New Mexico, but failed. I'm not sure why it wouldn't work, but I'll try it again tonight or tomorrow. I introduced SG to the Occult Watcher program and showed her how to use it and what it does. We will keep an eye on the weather and attempt to watch an occultation eventually. SG showed me the questions she made up for our Milestone Report and we will begin to answer them shortly to turn in a rough outline of our MR to TL. TL talked to us a bit about what we need to turn in and gave us some advice on doing so, as well.

Thursday, December 6th, 2007
I read an email from TL that gave us two questions to answer: What kinds of information can be gathered about asteroids through images? Are there other wavelengths available on line--you could use the Aladin applet (accessed through simbad, in turn through google earth's sky view as we did earlier this year) to compare your images of Ceres to images taken at other wavelengths (IR, UV, even radio if possible.) Basically I looked on Google Sky for the entire class and looked through Simbad and could not find anything on Ceres. I will continue looking tomorrow, but I can't find anything. I looked for more complex names or scientific names, but nothing turned up in the databases. I'll work on this problem tomorrow.

Friday, December 7th, 2007
I began to work on the Milestone report and read the email that TL sent SG so I am going to change all of our "questions" into "statements" and answer them in bullet point form. I worked more with the occultation program and will be adding that and the New Mexico Skies program into our milestone report as well. I will post the answers to the "statements" when I get finished with them, most likely sometime next week.

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