CM's+December+3,+2007

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Wowee! I cannot believe that it's already December! I spent a long time today updating my logbook from last week, while listening to Christmas music, so I apologize if there were mistakes. I was very scarce on details before, so I went back and added to my entries. I also created my logbook page for this week.
 * December 2, 2007**

Today we all had e-mails waiting for us when we got to class. DL sent us a rough outline of what our final projects need to entail. We are supposed to do a milestone of everything that we have done and learned so far this year. CC and I, I learned do not need to do this milestone report, though. Since we will be attending the conference in Austin, we will be using the poster that we make for that as our final project instead. That was a bit of relief to hear, because I have a feeling that this poster is going to be a lot of work, so I'm very glad that we don't have to do both! After this, DL called us all together and discussed milestones--what should be included in them (in a word, everything!), what format they should be in, and length. Although I don't have to do one now, I will be responsible for making more of these next semester, so that was a good introduction. After our talk, CC and I updated our glossary. We were verifying more of the galaxies witht the Hubble chart, and decided that it would be good to know what Sa, Sb, Sab, etc., meant. We posted these findings.
 * December 3, 2007**

Today CC and I received e-mails with a detailed written abstract of what our poster should include for the conference. We decided to take this time to make a visual abstract of it, and just up a very rough, not-to-scale version of our poster. We have decided to give an introduction to our project and detail what it is that we're doing, the resouces that we have, and how we are documenting our progress through our wikispace pages. We also want to explain what Matt and Vinay did last year, and how they got started on this project. Another part of the poster will have a place for all of the publications from last year--the newspaper article and the article published in the RBSE Journal. We would also like to put some of the Excel Spreadsheets with the data on the poster. Most importantly, we will include how Spitzer is related to us and how we are using them as a resource for our project.
 * December 4, 2007**

Tonight I gave Matt a call, because CC and I had discussed some questions that we had on their project from last year. I didn't have my notes in front of me, so I did not get all of our questions answered, but we had a nice chat, and he gave me some insight. It turns out that the data that we found in the spreadsheets did indeed come from the Spitzer Space Telescope, however, they did not request where the information came from. It was put onto software that students and other scientists, I suppose, can use. Apparently the data produced by Spitzer is sometimes unclear, so these are clusters and numbers that are correct, but also easier to deal with.

Today was sort of a catch-up day for me. I haven't keep keeping completely up-to-date on my logbook this week, so I spent the first little bit of class getting that all ready. DL also pulled us aside for another group conversation about our milestone reports. We spent the rest of class in discussion. Tonight I finished up my logbook for the first part of this week!
 * December 5, 2007**

Today CC and I spent the entire class taking pictures of our wikispace page and the different components of it. We captured our main page, formulas page, glossary, and my notes pages. We then assembled them into a powerpoint presentation that we will be able to access from anywhere. DL suggested that we do this so that we will have a lot of different pictures to put on our poster. We wanted to get a lot from the wikispace pages, because that will be our focus at the conference. Though we are doing a project on astronomy and the different star formation rates in galaxies, there will be many more scientists at the conference who will know more than we will. Our focus with our poster is how we, as high school students, are able to learn about these things that scientists are studying now. The complex galaxy questions will then be fielded by the scientists! : )
 * December 6, 2007**

Today we continued to get more screen pictures from the wikispace and online. CC and I took a ton of images of all of the spreadsheets that we're using. We also figured out how to crop the pages, so that we could get the taskbar and all of that stuff off of it. I am hopeful that we will take care of assembling the poster next week. DL then talked to us about the milestones and the different types of milestone reports that can be done. They must be very detailed and include everything that we have learned thusfar.
 * December 7, 2007**

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