The Future's Gettin' Kinda Close

This past week has been pretty busy.  I've...

~Started working with entirely new data for my research project
~Produced two new codes
~Tried to write a proposal to get observing time on the VLBA (I'm definitely going to have to write a blog post about astronomers and their acronyms)
~Listened to a really hard-to-follow lecture on how to take data and turn it into an image
~Gone on a (short) tour of the tattoo shops in Charlottesville within bussing distance of my apartment (that has nothing to do with astronomy; it was just really fun)

But, most importantly, I've learned a lot about graduate school and the different paths that exist thereafter.

Let's start with last Friday.  A scientist at NRAO invited all of the summer students to his house for an informal discussion about grad school, career paths, networking, and all things future-related.  We were there for about five hours, but I learned so much (and I got to eat Indian food, which is always a positive in my book)!  We discussed GPAs, the GRE, how publishing papers works, the different career options after graduation, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  I left that night with two things on my brain:

1) I need to start meeting more people
2) OH MY GOD I HAVE TO GO TO GRAD SCHOOL AND FIGURE OUT WHAT I'M DOING WITH MY LIFE!!!

(Yes, the caps lock was necessary, because I was that frantic.)

So I took some deep breaths and emailed the TF from the astro classes I took last year.  He was a huge help and pretty much got rid of the crisis altogether.

Come Monday, I was ready for the next discussion about grad schools, and this time, I was excited.  Afterwards, trying to take care of that first thought, I asked someone if they could put me in contact with anyone who did astronomy education and public outreach.  They did, and this morning I met Tania Burchell, the wonderful woman who further opened my eyes to EPO.  She had so much great knowledge and advice to share, and is completely responsible for the creation of my new twitter page (@GoAstroMo because shameless plugs are great).

I guess I should probably say a little something about my research... I'm still coding.  That's about all I can say.  But I have found my new pump-up song.  Every time I hit a roadblock in my project, I listen to this, dance like an idiot, and continue typing away.

Coding Can Be...Fun!

Week 2 is done and it was even better than the first!  If I recall correctly, I was just starting my data analysis the last time I posted.  Here's what I've been up to since:

I finished that code I was working on at the end of the first week!  It took a couple days, but I finally figured out how to loop through the data I had reduced and add up the flux values for a range of selected wavelengths.  I was definitely making it more difficult than it had to be when I first tried to tackle the problem.  The hard part was actually identifying and calculating the different factors that contributed to the error in my intensity measurement.  But I did it!  It was my first solo-constructed script, and I was really damn proud.

Once I was done with that, my mentor had me start learning about modeling right away.  We're using these spectral lines to determine characteristics--temperature, density, metallicity, etc.--of a starburst galaxy, so one of the things I have to do is use the data that's been collected (by the Herschel telescope) to actually create a theoretical model of this galaxy.  My mentor told me to read a paper by Robert Rubin on modeling HII regions.  Most of the paper was filled with pages-long tables of data, which I was then asked to turn into a meaningful model with a code of my own creation.  And that's where it got really fun!

Simplified diagram of an HII Region from this University of California website

HII regions are large clouds of ionized hydrogen gas where a lot of star formation has just happened

Rubin's data came to me in 4-dimensional cubes with dimensions corresponding to metallicity, photon-number, temperature, and density.  My task was to turn it into a 5-dimensional "cube" with an extra axis representing the number of HII clouds in the galaxy model.  I had to do this because we don't know how many clouds the galaxy we're studying has, and creating a fifth dimension of data allows us to see which number of HII clouds most closely matches our own data.  After adding the extra dimension, I had to create chi square grids (which I now understand a lot better than I ever did when they tried to explain it in my introductory mechanics class) and calculate the probability that each model in Rubin's data actually matched our own.  So far, I've been working on this script for two days, and I'm still not done.  But every time I do something right, I can't help but do a little dance in my seat, and that's a great feeling!

On top of all that, I've been to two discussions about grad school and career paths in astronomy in the past 5 days.  I've barely been here for two weeks and they've already managed to convince me that I should pursue a Ph.D in astronomy.  But more on that in the next post, where I'll tell you all about my (new and very tentative) future plans.

Welcome to NRAO

I thought I was done with all of this blogging stuff for a while, but then my advisor suggested that I use this blog to document my summer internship.  It seemed like a pretty excellent idea, and his advice hasn't steered me wrong yet, so here I am. 

For those of you who don't know, I was granted the opportunity to work at the National radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) this summer.  When I boarded my train a little over a week ago, I literally only knew two things about the summer ahead:
1) My roommate's name was Tierra (there will almost definitely be more about her in future blogs).
2) My research project had something to do with a galaxy...somewhere in the universe.  

 

I was pretty terrified.  But I had already signed all of the official papers agreeing to show up, and I didn't want to find out what would happen if I didn't.  And I'm so glad I got on that train, because this last week has been amazing!

First, I'll give a quick description of the project I'm working on.  I'm using radio spectral lines to determine the physical characteristics of a galaxy, IRAS 08339+6517.  It's at a redshift of about 0.02, so it's far enough away that it looks like a point source in our images, but close enough that we can get some really good data from it.  Please, please, please ask me questions about the project!  Answering them will help me better understand what I'm doing. 

I started out last week with a bunch of data.  The program I was using, the Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE), provided the data in varying levels of reduction.  My first assignment was to go through the most processed level and see if I could find and identify the spectral lines.  It was actually pretty simple--look at the graphs and mark where there's a spike.  I found 6! 

My next assignment was to figure out how to reduce the data myself.  That was interesting.  It involved some coding, though since I was provided with a skeleton script, the bulk of my job was to add some values and do some debugging. 

Finally I got to do some analysis!  After 4 days of reducing data (which I understand is nowhere near as long as some people have to do it) to a useable form, I was asked to find the intensity of each spectral line.  I got to make my own script (with some help from my research mentor) and go through what I have identified as the typical stages of coding:

excitement
confusion
annoyance
hair-tearing anger
utter elation

And that was my first week!  I'm not completely sure what the next step is, but I'm here for 10 weeks, so I know I have a lot left to do.