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.