Palomar Observatory: Day 2
I got a little closer to the Hale 5m scope! You can see how big the dome is here During the night, we weren’t observing, but we were furiously preparing for everything! Here is a work station I was...
View ArticlePalomar Observatory: Day 3
Our observing program runs on the nights of 14-15 November 2012; our proposal information can be found here. Paola and I spent the last two nights acclimatizing to the night-time schedule, watching the...
View ArticlePalomar Observatory: Day 4
When observing at Palomar Observatory, observers stay in a placed called ‘The Monestary,’ which is a little house about a 7 min walk from the ‘scope. It got this name because anyone entering the...
View ArticleCFHT queue update, Part 4: so…close
So. Close. The most recent data has come back from CFHT, and we ALMOST got all our pointings. We are at 95.5% completed on our observing run. MegaCam will be back on the ‘scope fo Dec 13-20, so we may...
View ArticleSerendipity: Finding an Asteroid
The research group that I am a part of (Pat, Paola, Laura, and myself), proposed to the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (or CFHT) earlier this year to get some photometry covering a rather large section...
View ArticleFinding Asteroid #2: Serendipity…..again!
Late last year I posted an article on finding an asteroid, serendipitously, in my data from CFHT (see the post here). Well…I found another one! Luckily, this new asteroid happen to pass by a beautiful...
View ArticleQuasar Club: BAL Variability on Short Time-Scales
Title: Variability in quasar broad absorption line outflows III: What happens on the shortest time-scales? Authors: Capellup, Hamann, Shields, Halpern, Barlow Abs: Broad absorption lines (BALs) in...
View ArticleCFHT queue update, Part 5: The End
The observing team at CFHT was able to sneak my last observing group in mid January, allowing me to get 100% completeness on the proposal we submitted last year. Now it’s on to this data reduction and...
View ArticleNotes on ‘Towards a Unified AGN Structure’
Notes are based on the (submitted) paper ‘Towards a Unified AGN Structure,’ by Kazanas et al. Motivation: ‘The notion of AGN as an astronomical object of solar system dimensions and luminosity...
View ArticleNotes on ‘A new distance measure using AGN’ [sic]
For the Astronomy Journal Club this week I will be presenting the paper entitled ‘A New Cosmological Distance Measure Using Active Galactic Nuclei,’ authored by Watson, Denney, Vestergaard, and Davis....
View ArticleBullet Cluster: Evidence for Dark Matter
It is clear from observations of the Milky Way, galaxies, and galaxy clusters that our theoretical understanding of gravity as we know them (i.e., Newton and Einstein) do not explain the orbital...
View ArticleCFHT 2013B queue update, Part 1
This map shows the number of pointings completed to 31 August 2013 for our CFHT 2013B data run. In the fall of 2012, I PI’d a proposal to get 675 images taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope...
View ArticleGMOS reductions – My Prescription
Our research group is in the middle of receiving data from Gemini/GMOS, so I’ve written out here a thorough (but readable) reference for the steps needed to run reductions on the data that comes back...
View ArticleCFHT 2013B queue update, Part 2: The End
I’ve been a bit behind posting about this, so this is the last post regarding queue updates for 2013B. But that’s good news, though! Let me explain. Our 2013B CFHT program collects data from August to...
View ArticleA varying quasar spectrum
I’ve been working on reducing, plotting, and normalizing Gemini spectra over the last little while. Here’s a final product. Here’s an example of the type of spectra I’m working on. In chronological...
View ArticleUnderstanding quasar host galaxies
Low redshift quasars in the SDSS Stripe 82. The host galaxies Faloma et al. (2014), arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.4300 Motivation The phenomenon of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are understood to be...
View ArticleUndergrad vs. Grad
On the left: all the work I did during my undergrad. On the right: all the work I did on my Master’s
View ArticlePrinceton
Peyton Hall, the building for astronomy and astrophysics at Princeton University. I recently visited Princeton University to attend The Multi-Wavelength, Multi-Epoch Heritage of Stripe 82, a workshop...
View ArticleFLASH Talk for NOAO
The National Optical Astronomy Observatory consolidates much of the optical astronomy in the United States into one office. Its main locations are the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Arizona,...
View ArticleMJD calculation
I was attempting to find a simple way to calculate Modified Julian Day (MJD) from local observing time without having to re-invent the wheel. Someone MUST have done this before. Enter Astropy to save...
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