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__Tuesday January 8th, 2008__ The first day of the trip in Austin was a little bit overwhelming. Dr. L had a poster to put up that day so we spent a good portion of our time in the poster area of the convention. In this area there were two types of posters/groups. One group were major science foundations and companies. This included the Spitzer Space Foundation, Hubble Space Foundation, various different publishing companies like IOP Publishing, and many other similar groups. They had set up perminent shops or areas with several posters and flat television screens. They looked like they were there to answer questions about future projects about whatever group they involved. Many of the things they had in each area explained what worked had been worked on by this group. The Spitzer Space Foundation had representatives answering questions about the future of the Spitzer Space Telescope. These types of groups would give out posters, pamphlets, and other information materials for people to take. The second group involved single posters placed on felt backboards by tacks. These involved smaller projects that mostly would use data obtained by the larger groups and would analyze the data. An example of one poster that was there was about AGN in specific galaxies. This was our group of posters. This group of posters provided more specific information about individual research projects carried out by graduate students and smaller observatories. As we looked around the poster area briefly, Dr. L suggested we go to a lecture in the Ballroom in the floor above. These lectures covered somewhat general areas of research. That day we heard a lecture about Jupiter. The lecture covered most information of Jupiter from weather and lightning strikes in the atmosphere to volcanic eruptions of one of Jupiter's moons. These lectures lasted about an hour each. The second lecture I went to talked about the search for exoplanets, research about the type of atmospheres found, and possibility of finding a earth-like exoplanet. Each lecture had an audiance of over 200 people attending the conference. After the lectures, Dr. L took down his poster. The group of posters that we belonged to would only have their posters up for one day. Each day a new set of posters made by various groups would be set up and at the end of the day taken down. We were given a booklet that gave the titles of all the posters that would appear each day and the people involved in the posters. After the conference was over, Dr. L, CM, and I joined up with Greg and three other people for dinner. The other three people included a high school senior, a high school science teacher, and researcher. The high school senior was also presenting a poster, but was in relation with the high school teacher. At dinner, we talked about what each person's poster was about and Greg explained to us about SED curves and SFR.
 * This week's Logbook will be a reflection of the Trip to Austin and will not cover Monday**

__Wednsday January 9th, 2008__ On the second day of the conference, we didn't have a poster to set up so most of the day we spent listening to lectures that were schedualed that day. The beginning lectures that we went to were about teaching of astronomy in various areas. These were smaller lectures than yesterday in smaller rooms with about at most 30 people. Several lectures like this one would be happening at the same time in other rooms on the floor and people would choose what lectures they wanted to listen to based on their interests. Each room had a different theme of lectures and each speaker would have a set time to give their individual presentation. These lectures were more subject specific and included more technical aspects of research including charts and data sheets. Some of the information was a little above my head. The lecture began with talking about graduate programs then went to new websites that were opening up to classes even a group that created a website where classes could schedual time to remotely control a telescope to use for each classes' purpose of star-viewing. We then attended a large lecture in the Ballroom.

In the afternoon, we started looking at the poster area. The main groups were still set up and we talked to one group that was involved in creating an imaging and simulations of many stellar objects like exoplanet systems and a model of our solar system. Then we went up to another smaller lecture. This time it was about Google mostly about Google Earth and Google Sky. We had used Google Sky many times in class last semester, but this lecture was talking about new features that was going to appear in the new update of Google Earth that was released today. These new features included looking at infared images from Spitzer and X-ray images. They showed how particular galaxies, nebulae, and other stellar objects had these images and you could put the layers ontop of the optical image. You could not only see the infared images but could compare the differences between optical and infared. It was interesting how much Google Earth was moving towards opening up Google Sky to also be a tool for researchers. They could access the .Fits files through Google Sky now, making it more accessible to everyone. After these series of lectures we went to a larger lecture that involved the board of Science Survey. This explained to us how projects recieved funding and the lecture gave a brief overview of the survey they were going to conduct which would cover projects done during this decade. They opened the floor to anyone who wanted to ask questions or dicuss some point about policy of funding.

__Thursday January 10th, 2008__ The third day was our day to put up our poster that we had created. We would be standing by the poster for most of the time that day with CM and I taking shifts while the other would walk around and look at the other posters. We set up the poster at 9:30 that morning and spent most of the morning near our poster. People would pass and mostly just look at our poster title and the pictures. Some people would come up and ask for us to explain what our project was about and then a couple of questions about the project. Most of the people who ask about our project were professors and people interested in bringing science research to a broader audience. I would answer their questions as best I could and Dr. L would occasionally answer some of the harder questions about administration of our science research class. One of the people who visited turned out to be the director for the Spitzer Space Foundation although I didn't know it at the time. He asked about our project and was interested in how the Spitzer data we were given was being used. He was glad to see the data being used for our project. After lunch, we went to some more lectures. The first was in the Google Earth lecture room. They went on in explaining how Google Sky could be used for serious research in data archiving. Some of it was a little of a repeat from yesterday, but this time the speakers were representatives from the foundations like Spitzer who explained how the data was being incorporated into Google Sky. The next lecture was in the Ballroom. It was about Galaxy evolution and research done to simulate galaxy collisions, history of galaxies, and how galaxies change over time. The speaker talked about Star Formation in redshift galaxies and how earlier galaxies were making more stars than today. She then talked about different galaxy clusters and galaxy collisions over time. The second lecture in the Ballroom talked about Gamma Ray Bursts. I had some knowledge of the subject from watching a program about it earlier and I was interested in the lecture. Gamma Ray Bursts are enormous explosions of energy from space that produces light waves across the spectrum even in the high energy gamma wave length. The lecture talked about Swift which is a space telescope designed to detect gamma ray bursts in both the long and short types. Gamma ray bursts only last for a few seconds and short gamma ray bursts last for only on average of 2-3 seconds. The telescope is designed to detect the gamma ray bursts and turn itself towards the source and get the position of the source. It relays the positioning to ground-based observatories who turn their telescopes to obeserve the visible and other light spectrum that follows the gamma ray burst. They talked about some of the bursts that have been observed so far using Swift. They discovered that some bursts are accompanied by supernova a few moments later. These supernova have a higher energy explosion that most supernova. The reason for this is so far unexplained. The lecture was very interesting and I enjoyed it alot. After all the lectures, we went back to our poster, but there wasn't much time left in the day so not many people came by. We packed up the poster and took everything back to the hotel room.

The next day we left back to South Bend so we didn't go back to the conference.