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.