August 18

This morning I ran the dust maps through the sigma filter command that I got from NASA's astro library. That was after trying to smooth them, trying to thin them, trying to erode them, and trying to run them through low-pass filters. Eventually, none of that worked and Jake told me to run them through another command and then smooth them so I did that and the day ended.

August 15

Today, I transferred files into my folder from Jakes. Once I got the new galaxies I made a DUST MAP for each using the 555 nm and 814 nm files. Monday I'll smooth them. We also brainstormed for the presentation.

August 14

Today I researched Matrices for Brad's Code. As is, the code uses a four-loop to set up the images, so I'm trying to research a process to use a set of matrices to do the sam thing in a shorter time.

August 12

Poster

August 8

Today I worked on my poster and sat through a few of the undergrad presentations. I sat through Brad Snios and Brian Rogue talking about our work in astronomy. I also sat through Carla's presentation on X-Ray galaxies. The highlight of my day was definitely lunch. Partially because it was free but mainly because Stefi and Professor Axon gave me a crash course in the Physics behind Supermassive Black Holes. It was cool because I'd never really known why we were looking for star development when the process was already decently well understood. It was really cool to have a conversation about the astrophysics of supermassive black holes and their "episodic" nature (Professor Axon's words) and actually understand it and the unknown areas that we're trying to research. It helped a lot with my poster to.

August 7

Today I worked mainly on my poster. I got through the most difficult visual on the poster. It shows how the final color images went together. The graphic looks simple enough, but since I was working with powerpoint, it took longer than I had expected to position and size them right so that they look good. Tomorrow I'll add in the text and most likely finish up the majority of the poster. Olympics start tomorrow night.

August 6

Today I spent the morning trying to figure out eroding in color. I was working with color jpegs so Tom and Nicole's wasn't any help as it only worked for grayscale tiff files. That made it really hard because if my files had been a different format, I could've just used the code they wrote. We weren't able to reduce the size of the pixels in the images so I started to experiment with different color tables in idl. Eventually I settled on color table 12 which was incremental instead of gradual in assigning colors. This meant that the farthest point that I've been trying to filter out, would register as black as opposed to green in the other images. Once I eroded the images using color table 12 I went through and isolated the higher wavelengths in the picture using the command A[*,*,1]=0 and transferring them back into the grayscale color table while keeping them in true color. Once this was done, I had images with large pixels still but that only showed points of interest.