Day 34

Today we practiced our presentations and I'm glad because now I'm more relaxed for tomorrow. I also looked up known double-doubles in the VLA archive to see if any matched the ones I found but they didn't, not a great note to end on, oh well.

Day 33

Today I looked up some things in my presentation so that I'll be able to explain them better on Friday and I looked for more images.

Day 32

Today we practiced our presentations for the insight lab group and mine was extremely short, but I've added some stuff and hopefully I'll be able to make it closer to ten minutes by Friday.

Day 31

This morning I had tennis practice so I came in late, then I finished my power point and helped Ashley put up the cube.

Day 30

It's the end of week 6 and I'm gonna repeat myself and say they've gone by EXTREMELY fast. I got a lot done on my powerpoint but I'm still looking for more images to put on. I tried to help Sean with his code but I wasn't too much help.

Day 29

Today I worked some more on my powerpoint and I attended the galaxy talk all most all of which went right over my head.

Day 28

I put a lot of info on the wiki page today and am embarrassed to say I need pencil, paper and a calculator to do simple subtraction but over all it was a productive day.

Day 27

Wow these numbers are getting high it doesn't seem like I've worked 27 days, the summer went by fast. Today I pulled information on the galaxies I'm looking at out of the vla archive.

Day 26

Today I talked to an IT guy who told me that since they're "short staffed" and because they're going to get rid of this computer when I'm done he won't bother installing powerpoint!?!?! If they're gonna get rid of the computer once I'm done there's absolutely NO good reason I can't be admin for it, the clock's been wrong since I set it up, but I can't change it, and it's just plain annoying. But I don't feel like pushing the point because I'm done in two weeks and I can use the computer lab when I have to.

Other than that I looked for further information on the double-doubles I found but I don't think I came up with anything useful.

Day 25

Friday was a lot of fun, we went to all the undergrads presentations and got (another) free lunch, although I didn't end up getting much work done.

Day 24

On Thursday I started on my powerpoint but only the text part because I don't have powerpoint on this computer.

Day 23

Last Wednesday was a picnic! For the undergrads really, but the interns were invited.

Day 21 and 22

Yesterday we visited the U of R laser lab where they're attempting to perfect a new power source based on fusion, among other things. Today I narrowed down all the galaxies I was looking at to about 15 and posted those pictures on the insight lab's wiki page.

Day 20

Last Friday we went to ITT and took a tour. It was really interesting but the idea of a "lifewalk" freaked me out a bit. We learned about how they make the optics for space telescopes and about a system for detecting gas emissions.

Day 19

Today was more pictures, even the ones I think might be double-double galaxies I'm not sure about so I might end up finding none, which would suck. And the insight lab wore our matching t shirts.

Day 18

Today I looked at MORE pictures looking for double-double galaxies. We also had a pizza party for Duygu's birthday which was fun and I went to a PHD dissertation about detecting gas emission from a satellite image, it was confusing but I got the basic idea, I think.

Day 17

More pictures today, plus a meeting with Stephi and Chris (I'm hoping that's how there names are spelled.) I should be done soon!

Day 16

Today I looked at more galaxies and I volunteered for an eye tracker study. I wore the eye tracker and looked at a series of pictures, wearing the eye tracker made me very self aware of where in the picture I was looking so it was kind of weird, but the brownie she gave me was very good.

Day 14 and 15

I'm going to combine these two days because I did pretty much the same thing on both of them. I looked at pictures of potential double-double galaxies and decided whether or not they really were double-double. Also on Friday the insight lab group got matching t-shirts and paraded around campus to show them off.

Day 13

This morning we took a tour of the RIDL lab in the basement and saw one sensor that was evidently worth a half a million dollars which I found pretty impresive. After that I made a couple attempts at trying to get the IDL program to run, it's looking pretty promising this time and hopefully if I let it run over night it will be done by tomorrow.

Day 12

I finished the graphs today! But the next step in the process is running an IDL program which I keep getting error messages from, other than that today has been pretty uneventful.

Day 11

I went through more graphs today. It would have been a boring day if I didn't have itchy bug bites all over my feet and ankles those tipped the scale from boring day to annoying day. There doesn't seem to be an end to those graphs.

Day 8

Today is my last day before going on vacation for four days and I spent it looking at endless graphs. Literally endless because I still have yet to finish and am going to spend my vacation praying this computer won't shut off because if it does all my work is lost. But since I'm actually writing this on Monday I'll let everyone know that the computer stayed on and I can pick up with the graphs where I left off.

Day 7

Today I looked at many many graphs of optical and radio sources and decided whether they were potential double-double galaxies. Doing too many in row is very dizzying. A rather sad part of this internship is that we rarely get to go outside, plus the room I'm in has no windows and it's even more sad when the days are so nice like today. So today we ate lunch outside (akwardly) on the benches near the bus stop but for all I know by now it's raining or the sky turned orange ;)

Day 6

Today I learned how to run Jeff's program that I'm going to use to identify double-double radio galaxies, it's fairly confusing but he wrote out the steps on the board (hopefully no one erases it.) Then I was further confused while trying to read and article on the Hubble constant though I think I get the gist of it.

Day 5

It's the last day of our first week, I still haven't gotten exactly what I'm going to be doing yet. But today I sent a bunch of emails to IT and they sent a person down to install Xming and I set up PuTTY. Then I started to read an article about the Hubble Constant but it was slow going. This week actually went by faster than I expected it to.

Day 4

I'm still trying to get my computer set up, Chris from IT helped me hook up to the internet but because for some reason I can't be administrator of my own computer I can't install Xming and am waiting on a response from an email sent to computer help people. So all in all today wasn't that productive except for I did find out what I am going to be doing when Jeff finishes his program.

Day 3

Today I spent pretty much the entire day setting up a computer and trying to get it connected to the internet (with little success) but I also finally got a computer account and the right ID. The IDL class today made a lot more sense but I'm still a little nervous about working with it on my own.

Day 2

This morning we read an article on star formation and how astronomers gage how old stars and galaxies are, then we went to the library and did more research on active galaxies. After lunch we had our first class on programing with IDL, the beginning made sense but it got more confusing as it went on. I really hope whatever I end up using it for isn't as complicated as some of the stuff he showed us. When class was over we started to track down computers, keyboards, mice, desks ect..

Day 1

Today was the first day of my internship. The morning was fun, we split into two teams and did a scavenger hunt/team building activity. However as great as the first part of the day was it wasn't able to make up for the afternoon. I started to feel nauseous a little after lunch and was throwing up in the bathroom when the fire alarm went off. So good morning, bad afternoon. I'm really hoping tomorrow will be better.