Astronomy and Coffee: November 2005

Friday, November 25, 2005

Finally work!

Today no paper work!

Spent the whole day preparing the observation that starts monday at the INT in La Palma ... wishing for clear sky!

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Lots of paperwork!

City hall paper work!! Health security paperwork! University paperwork!

At least we had a great talk given by my good friend Dimitri Gadotti about bars [in galaxies] ... now we're going to a bar hehehehehehe

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Paperwork "Do It" day!

Only paperwork and arrangements for lots of things. No science at all! Bad, tomorrow morning is paperwork again, but now at the city hall and other government offices ... bad also.

Fortunately tomorrow will have a talk by a friend of mine, Dimitri Gadotti, that is working in Munich.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

One "Do it!" day!

Today was a "Do it!" day, even if it is "mechanical" things.

Spent the day filling the huge (20 pages) german contract ... in german, which had to be "revised" by Bodo (native german speaker). Got to the director for signatures, but he still needs to talk to Bodo, tomorrow morning, about technical issues. After it is signed, gotta get some documents to take all together to the university administration.

Things here have some infinite loops. You need a document to get the contract signed, but to get this document you need the contract signed, which needs the document, which needs the contract ... there are some of those. Fortunately we already know how to break them.

Enough with paper work and complaints!

Science. Processing the flats now. They still look bad, but not so bad. Tomorrow I'll finish it (hope so) and check if they are that bad or not!

Also tomorrow (that's the reason for the "hope so" on the upper sentence) gotta finish planning the observation. Select the best targets, B plan, extra targets and do the finding charts.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Yet another late post ...

That's the post from monday! :-)

More working and less thinking (I agree with David, the days should be more like "DO IT!").

Filling my contract, which is in German ... 20 pages ... kind of hard to do! hehehehe

Started the analysis of the simulations of CMB and also kept on reprocessing the Laica run!

The weekend was not very productive in terms of work, but very relaxing (too cold to leave home!).

I think I'm getting a cold ... that's bad and scary 'cos I have to go to La Palma to observe next sunday!!!

Friday, November 18, 2005

Thinking day

Not really a usefull day, more on thinking than on doing ... weekend will be the other way round, more doing than thinking :-)

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Reprocessing

Something seemed wrong on this data pack ... so, from scratch, now with full control.

The day was spent basically in processing the pack until I found it weird and travel arrangements for next week to La Palma.

Tomorrow the reprocessing and planning the observation.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Late post from yesterday :-)

The day was basically spent with ccd-processing part of the images and at the end I found out that I really have to process the whole 7 nights pack to get something useful ... too bad for me :-)

Also some scripting for the CMB simulations analysis.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Journal Club really starts

Today we really started our "Pizza" Journal Club, actually without pizza because we still had to discuss how the pizza stuff would work, but it was good. 12 people from different areas, what should turn the thing more interesting. Next week we'll put a list to know who's up for the pizza. We also discussed some science :-))

Also processing the observational run, which is 12 times bigger than an "old style" one. Is a 4 CCD's camera (I'm using only 3 of them) and each is 4-port readout (i.e. 4 overscans). It will take a while! Tomorrow I'm back to it!

Monday, November 14, 2005

Processing the whole pack!

During the weekend I found out that the dome flats are "consistent with each other" but not very good to correct the image large scale variations and that the twilight flats are totally bad! They really suck! One flat is not consistent with the next one ... none of them present a good correction to large scale variations of the image ... there's no way you can combine them and make them work.

Solution to be tried: combine the pix-to-pix variation of the dome flats with large scale variation estimated by the science frames themselves. Let's see if it work.

In that sence I started to process the whole package of images ...

Also some bureaucracy to the projects around here ... and a bike flat tire! :-)

Friday, November 11, 2005

Flatfields 4

Flatfield stuff still going on! But now it seems to have some light at the end of the tunnel!

Evening in PhD celebration of a friend.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Flatfields 3

Busy day, but not with new science!

Lots of meetings on the institute and on the internet in order to make some decisions on where the project heads. And also a visitor for a talk, what implies some attention and a dinner :-))

Tomorrow things will be calmer! hehehehe

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Flatfields 2

Seems that the problems with flatfields are never ending ... tomorrow I'll have to try new solutions ...

Also some discussion about the RMS of the CMB maps for the paper.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Flatfields GRRRRRR

The whole day trying to deal with the flatfield problem of this Laica run ... tomorrow I'll find the solution!

Monday, November 07, 2005

Busy weekend!!

Pretty busy weekend and monday!

dN/dS monte-carlo simulations running on 20 computers around the world. 10000 runs of each of the two normalization cases we need to look at ... managing that pool is a lot of work that took me part of the day! That is done. Now I have to write some routine to analise it hehehehehehe

At least I have something to present on the hypothetical conference about "monte-carlo method" that will be help in Monte Carlo some day, as was discussed in Marseille during a nice lunch :-)))))

Also flatfielding was carried during the weekend, and I found out that this camera has a TERRIBLE flatfield, or I'm doing something wrong. Now I'll have to check all the flats all over again to be sure about the selection. I hope that's the problem. It's a lot of work, but with an easy solution. That was the rest of the day (and night until now ...).

Friday, November 04, 2005

IEEEEEEE Friday!!

Simple day! :-)

Data reduction going on (loaded on the laptop for a "funny" weekend)!

Simulations on dN/dS for the CMB paper running in 20 computers :-)

Monday it will be ready! hehehehehe

Thursday, November 03, 2005

More data reduction

Today the day was mainly contacting people in the Canary islands for my talk there after observing, data reduction, talking a bit with the PhD student I'm giving photometry informations and going to the bank because my card hot damaged somehow and they're gonna send me a new one. Plain day wasn't it???

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Dia de Finados

"Dia de finados", in my language, day of the dead in english. The day that started bad, fortunately turned into a normal day :-)

Bad means bad weather, no hot water 'cos the heating system is being fixed, jazz concert I wanted to see was sold out, the tickets to La Palma are not ready yet, the section of the university I wanted to go has moved building and no one knows where and I forgot my access card at home ... (all this before 11:00 AM :-) ). The afternoon changed to wind and it was a normal day.

Finished the arrangements to the observing trip and reduced data! Good! Tomorrow more data reduction with no bad things!!!

Lots of coffee today hehehehehehe

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Done

Day spent polishing the talk and with the talk (15:15) takes literally the whole afternoon. Now it's early, but already night (that's so annoying), so gonna go home and study a bit of German.

Tomorrow back to the image reduction.

Astronomy and Coffee