Proposals ... yet
Day of proposals. Basically finished my part on it, since I'll be back on monday night, only, and the deadline is tuesday at noon. Let's see how it goes!
Weekend and monday in Berlin. We need to go there to do the birth registration of Matheus at the Brazilian embassy, so nothing better than a weekend in Berlin with the family!
(added in the morning: yesterday I activated the Time Machine for backup of my MacBook, after at least two friends had problems with their MacBook hard disks, extra backup is never enough)
Dr. Verdugo
Today was Miguel Verdugo's thesis presentation. We have a new doctor :-)
Also more work on proposals, it's amazing the amount of time we spend on that every year!
More on proposals ...
Text editing, reading and searching for references and data, such as the "dwarf poor compact groups" and also searching for an extra target for one of the proposals ...
Tonight was my first night alone taking care of Matheus and we survived!!!
More on proposals
Easter at home, some work on proposals, some house work, ... today was a busy day with non-work related things and also some discussion on proposals, some reading and checking for it and the rehearsal presentation of Miguel Verdugo, for thursday morning ...
Easter
So! Late from yesterday.
Yesterday was a proposal day. Text for one proposal sent to the Co-Is, text and target selection for another proposal in production ...
Some modification in figures for the paper, some text improvements (things you do on a train), a failed try to reproduce results of a related paper ... people don't publish their equations ... I agree with Hogg's comments that people should be able to reproduce the results of any paper ... at least the main ones, specially if they are a relation from two quantities published in the same manuscript ... anyway.
Easter at home! Today (friday) is Matheus 2nd month birthday, so today (and the large weekend) I'll try to give him (them) all the attention I can to compensate for the weeks in Garching.
Still on proposals ...
And that will last a bit longer.
Text here, figure there, ideas on another and there it goes.
Today also the ESO health exam (even 1.5 months after start working) and a discussion over coffee about organizing conferences.
A good meeting with Roland Jesseit and his student Rhea Remus. They want to do simulations of groups of galaxies and that's something I'm very interested. They expect to simulate also compact groups. Something I need from simulation is a "prove" that the IGL traces the Dark Matter. We claim so, since the stars are dispersed in the potential, that is dominated by the dark matter halo, in the old "light traces matter". Also we need a calibration for our "dynamical clock", a mean fraction of light stripper in each crossing time ... I hope we can really do this together!
Proposal season ...
Weekend at home, including friday where I was working in two proposals to ESO but didn't have time to "blog" it.
Yesterday I had to stay in Goettingen "in service of the family" since Fernanda had a neck problem and needed extra help for her and for Matheus. Things of life!
Today writing a proposal. Tomorrow it keeps going ...
Paper sent
Revised the text of the paper, arranged a figure a bit better and sent the paper to the co-authors.
Also a proposal meeting with Bodo, Michael Hilker and Steffen Mieske. Now is writing it.
Some work estimating how deep we have to go in other proposal. Yep the proposal season is there!
Also organizing the last cluster to run GALAPAGOS. That has more pointings ...
Paper day
So! Today was a paper day. Finished a version for the text, gonna read it tomorrow, with a fresh mind, to see if it's OK and it should go to the co-authors until the end of the day.
Also we had an informal discussion about dynamo and magnetic fields in the sun and other stars. Is nice to see some stuff you worked with some time ago, like magnetic breaking, rapid and slow rotators ...
The Wine & Cheese was nice. Three small talks, and people seemed to have liked what I talked about.
Overview part II
Today was the part II of ESO overview, basically new instrumentation and science. It was good, the new instrumentation part was too much information to be kept in mind, so no comments about it. At the end a good discussion on how to improve communication in the institute.
In the morning I reviewed my mini-talk of tomorrow and attended to my first talk at the MPA, where David Wilman talked about the death of galaxies in groups.
Also some paper writing after those activities and checking archive NIR observations to propose some new ones.
Now back to studying for my German driver's license.
ESO overview
Today and tomorrow, ESO overview. Two afternoons on "what's ESO", "how is ESO" and "what was done last year". Is a lot to talk about! Tonight there was also the Overview Party/Dinner. It was cool. Nice opportunity to get to know new people inside the institution.
In the morning working on the text of the paper in the train, it's flowing. At least for me, writing is a creative activity, so it doesn't happen "like this", but inspiration is in agreement with the "rush", so it's flowing.
In the end of the day I prepared my 10-15 min presentation for the Wine & Cheese of wednesday. Just have to revise it a bit tomorrow and it's ready.
On the text
Finished, at least until I notice something more is needed, the data analysis for this paper and moved on to the text (4 hours of train do good on texts).
Nice discussion over coffee about refereeing process, if they should be anonymous or not and so on ...
Arrived home to see my son smiling for the first time!
Analyzing Surface Brightness profiles
The whole day I analyzed surface brightness profiles of the IGL. Different centers (since the IGL is not like a galaxy where a center is more or less clear), different parameters, but in all the cases residuals where too large, an obvious thing since the isophotes are clearly not elliptical and the overall shape of the IGL is very irregular. I just wanted to be 100% sure I couldn't take any physical information on that. Trying to adjust the profiles gives totally unphysical parameters.
Talk at ESO by Amina Helmi about Cosmology with our own Galaxy. How streams can constrain dark matter halo shapes, formation of the galaxy and so on. Interesting things, even though different tests point toward opposite results like oblate and prolate DM halos.
Keeps going
More progress on the paper development today, even though less than I expected ... it's part of the game. Tomorrow it keeps going.
Closing up
So! The last days, when Matheus let me do something (he has cramps and that compromises the whole house) and now that I'm in Garching, I'm closing the last small issues to finish the IGL paper.
Checking surface brightness profiles, masses, M/L, some dual analysis of groups and I wanna finish it all tomorrow and go back to the text, that I intent to finish before the weekend, to enjoy the weekend beside the family.
Yesterday the mother in law arrived, so we have an extra help with Matheus, who, I was already told, is behaving very well today!
The whole issue with Hickson's code adaptation, not sure I already told that here, is to calculate the parameters in the concordance cosmology (lambda has a very small effect, but it has some, in the "local" universe. Now I have the masses, luminosities, separations and dynamics all calculated to the new values.
