July 12

Today began as expected before the fire alarm went off. Startled, I looked around, at first thinking it was the RU's computer (his computer had been making funny noises all morning). Then, I noticed the flashing lights. Allyse, Madi and I left the building, following the RU and Mr. Callens. The public safety vehicle and the firetruck came and swept the building while some of the interns hypothesized that the MRI interns had triggered the alarm (they hadn't-it was a false alarm).

After returning to the building, I caught up on blog posts and finished and took notes on my first lecture series. The second link for the lecture series was a practical for AstoImageJ (which I desperately need), but the dataset is local and unavailable to me. I emailed Kristina about it, but then Professor Kastner asked if I had any questions so I showed him the webpage. He told me I could probably do the tutorial with our own image stream, so I will most likely do that tomorrow or Thursday. The images I'd use for the tutorial would be vband (visual) images and would be like a practice run for what I am actually doing with iband images (infrared images). I will be doing data reduction and photometry on these images. 

From what I read, photometry is measuring the flux (brightness) of a star. However, corrections need to be made for time variable transparency and seeing variations. There is also the extinction correction which converts the instrumental magnitude, which is measured on earth, to what it would be if the data was collected outside of earth's atmosphere. This type of calibration of photometry is necessary because many factors come into play from the time when the star emits light to when it reaches the CCD, and therefore effects the readings. 

With the problem with the P03 lecture, I moved on to L04, where I learned about photometric systems.