Thursday of the second week. For the past several days I've been unbelievably tired. The stress of so much travel and so many schedule changes is finally catching up to me. This is an acceptable time to be burnt out because I am gently settling into a schedule.
My experience of astronomy continues to be predominantly computer programming. The Python workshop we worked through on Tuesday was extremely relevant to the research I'll be doing here. In fact, it incorporated some of the data that Rebecca Larson used in her own previous project! A list of hundreds of numbers (wavelengths of light observed at a certain location in the sky) is all that we have to begin with. We guess that the most dominant wavelengths will all be around the same average number, so we should see a spike in the occurrence of that wavelength. Because this is a real observation and not pure mathematics, the numbers get a little messy, so while we will see a spike at an average value, we'll also see many (but not as many) occurrences of wavelengths near that, and a few more a little farther away. What this yields is a probability distribution. This is often called the standard or Gaussian distribution.
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| I made this plot |
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| Here is the code I wrote to make the above plot. Note: the green text is not code. It's all notes that I wrote to myself as I was going, so the code is a bit simpler than it looks at first glance |
We can see that the data does seem to fit the standard distribution. This is encouraging since that's what the general profile of light from a single distant galaxy usually looks like. I've also fitted a curve to it just to double check. This is the work of an astronomer. Specifically, this is the kind of fitting I will be doing in my research with Rebecca.
Last night Lara Eakins, an administrator with the department, held her weekly "Star Party", an event during which the roof of the Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy building (formerly Robert Lee Moore Hall) is opened to the public. A large visual telescope and computer equipment rest up there. I asked Lara as many questions about it as I could as she was setting up, probably getting in the way. But she is a great amateur astronomer and enthusiast, and was very accommodating. We were trying to get a view of Jupiter, but due to some high stratospheric clouds and even a bit of stormy weather moving in, it didn't initially look like we'd be able to. Patience seems to be the greatest virtue of an astronomer though. We waited it out, and just as Jupiter peaked through the clouds, I sighted it with my naked eye and called it out to Lara! We were able to use that to align the telescope visually. Because I had waited patiently with her, I got to look through the telescope before anyone else. Breathtaking. The cloud bands of Jupiter (not much larger in the eyepiece than the mouth of a straw) were visible as little rippling lines of grey, as well as one of its moons sparkling off its bottom left side. The wait paid off.
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| An image of Jupiter and its moons from Popular Science magazine |
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