start presentation

I am excited for the undergraduate research symposium on Friday, then next week will be the intern presentations. I finished and organized the spreadsheets for all the coefficients and calculated values into spreadsheets with different fits. One spreadsheet with H-alpha, sulfur, oxygen, iron. Then I sent it to Chris M so he could try to find some sort of trends. While he was doing that, I worked a little more on my presentation, and made the first four slides for the intern presentation. This is still the rough draft, but I'm just trying to form an outline.

today

today I didn't feel so well, but I continued to work. I talked with Chris M. and Dr. Robinson about what to include for the presentation and they explained the science and math of all the research we're doing. I now have a better understanding of all the stuff that's going on. I worked on outlining my presentation and what I want to include in the background, and some of the information in the middle. Then I got to calculating things like the expected location of the Halpha, sulfur, and oxygen lines with their redshifts. From that I used the doppler equation to find the velocity associated with the difference between the measured location and the expected location. Hopefully, next week we can try and make some sense of the huge amount of data that we have.

birthday!!!

Today's my birthday! yay. we had doughnuts during our meeting this morning. I copied numbers into excel today which was a pain because there were about 30 new objects and each with about 30 values to plug in. It took a long time to finish the whole spreadsheet, but I finally finished it. I also subtracted the oxygen and sulfur to get more iron lines from more objects using IDL. with the program, it turned out to be much faster to subtract the arrays.

lots of work

today I had lots of work to do. First, I finished the excel spreadsheet for all the objects and their own data. I then set out to calculate different things such as the velocity dispersion of each object, which required finding many other values such as the full width at half max, and the central wavelength of Halpha. I also calculated the continuum height of Halpha, which ended up being somewhat complicated because I had to use each coefficient for the Halpha fit into the equation for the continuum height. Then I had to find the area of the narrow line Halpha component, which was the integral of the narrow lines. Then came the broad line luminosity which required annoying conversions, but I finally got them done for each object. Efficient day overall. I have yet to make my presentation on Aug. 20.

today

today I was stuck plugging numbers into excel spreadsheet. It was extremely tedious and borring. Today was a pretty bad and borring day. But I did ask Dr. Robinson what would be the point of verifying the trend that as the narrow line goes down, the broad line goes up. He gave a full explanation of the spiraling material in the accretion disk and how it relates to the broad and narrow lines of the spectrum. I also took a look at the abstract for the research symposium that was due today.

not much to do

today I had to wait until Chris got me the data for the oxygen raw, fit , and continuum lines. So then I subtracted continuum and fit from raw data and sent that back to Chris. Then I waited for the rest of the data to finish it all up, but he decided he was going to do it over the weekend. Also, the date for the abstract was moved to monday so Dr. Robinson, Chris, and I will look over it then.

yesterday

I forgot to do the blog for yesterday, so here it is. I had more data to put through IDL and subtract the continuum and fit data from the raw data to get oxygen lines. I also copied more data onto excel for Hydrogen (Halpha), sulfur, and oxygen lines that gave better fits for the raw data. Some line fits had many different coefficients and values so it took quite a long time for me to put all the data onto excel. But I managed to finish at 3:30, so I decided to help the other research group with their collect.