Astronomy and Coffee

Long Weekend + Tables day + fine corrections day ...

So! Back from the long weekend!

Sunday was the Tour d'Energie, an amateur bike race that happens here in Goettingen before the arrival of the last stage of the Niedersachsen Rundfahrt (Tour of the Lower Saxony). Our race had 50 or 80 km, I raced the 80 km, the same as last year and finished in 3:02:36, so that my goals were accomplished: being better than last year! :-)) Last year I did it in 3:24:..., so 22 minutes faster. Not only the time was better, but the technical side was much better, so that I've learn something durring the year of training. For next year I have to reduce the amount of water I need to the race (go from 3.5 bottles to 2 bottles) so that I don't have to stop to get water and save a couple of minutes with it. The goal in the beginning of the winter was doing it in less then 3 hours ... considering that the race had actually 81.5 km, the 80 km were finished in a bit less than 3 hours, so that this goal was also accomplished! hehehehehe The whole story will be soon in Bikes and Coffee.

Today was a day of working in tables to organize the large amount of data I've got from ESO archive, about one of our clusters and start reducing it (reducing is faster than understanding what ESO sends you in a data request ...).

The fine correction part of the day was to do a fine kcorrection to the "precise" redshift of each of our galaxies in the "finished" cluster based on the new spectra and not in the old one. So that all the tables for this clusters were updated and now everything is fine :-)))

Some discussion with Miguel Verdugo about k-correction and Fukugita tables. He'll find some information about it and we'll hopefully keep on the topic tomorrow.

In addition to that, some "ping-pong" e-mails with Elif Kutdemir, one of our PhD students that is spending some time in Gronningen, that will continue tomorrow.

Also got a very nice reply from Michael Blanton about M/L passbands and kcorrect, where the M/L are given in the input filter set (in rest frame) and I wanted to know a way to do it in the "output" filter set. Thanks for the reply! Tomorrow I'll send a couple of extra questions about our strange M/L results to a multi-redshift sample of galaxies. I hope Mike can shed some light in this issue!

posted by Cris Da Rocha @ 11:52 PM