Kevin's RIT CIS Blog

August 18

2008-08-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-12T13:56:00.001-07:00

Poster

August 8

2008-08-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

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.

August 5

2008-08-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Today I worked on eroding the colored jpegs that I created for brad earlier this summer. The problem I've been running into is that idl erodes the images great. It filters out the background noise and everything, however, the final images have extremely large pixels. They come out way to blurry and pixelated to use. I'm going to be looking into the congrid function tomorrow to try and enlarge the image.

August 4

2008-08-04T13:56:00.000-07:00

Today we got a tour of ITT Tech. It was cool to see all the stuff they were doing for observatories and here limited stuff about their work with the military. Also, the large machines were pretty cool to see working. After we got back I started working on eroding my cluster images for Brad to use in his paper.

August 1

2008-08-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

Today I spent the morning transferring files from Tom's account to mine. Jake assigned me totake images that Tom got at the beginning of the internship and compare them to images that Brian got last year. The images are of the same clusters just from different telescopes so to make sure that they're identical I need to synchronize their astrometries (using HASTROM again) and then lay them on top of each other. I need to set the images to different colors using so that we can see if there are any points in the images that don't line up. Since I'll be using red and green as my colors, if the images line up right then the whole image should be yellow. If there are any red or green spots that means that there are points in the images that don't line up. Unfortunately, the images that I got from Brian are not original (it was a year ago so that's understandable) so the astrometry is missing in their headers. This means that I can't synchronize Tom's images to them and the two won't line up regardless if they're the same images or not. I'll probably get the images off of galex to compare to Tom's.

July 31

2008-07-31T13:52:00.000-07:00

Today I drew a really good alligator after we got back from U of R. It was pretty cool seeing all the bioengineering work that the U of R interns were doing. I was really interested in the nueronoplasticity work and all the data they were collecting about the way neurons interact.

July 28

2008-07-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

Today I started to test Brad, Brian, and Greggers' code with Infrared Data. Unfortunately though, the data wasn't working with the code so now I have to go through the Optical data for each galactic cluster and resynchronize the headers to that of the UV Data. Then I need to put those images through the code.

July 25

2008-07-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

Today I synchronized the headers of Greg's infrared images, to his UV data. It took a while downloading the files and then figuring out how to read them. Turns out that the infrared files require an extra command to set them equal to a variable. Once Nicole and me figured it out though, it went pretty fast.

July 23

2008-07-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

Today I started helping Brad, Greg, and Brian with the code they're writing for idl. The point of the code is to get an accurate surface brightness profile for elliptical objects. The current programs for surface brightness profile only work with circles so they are using a program called MPFits2dPeak for the ellipses. The problem we've run into is that the program has a tendency to focus in on clusters that we don't want it to because the clusters we're focusing on are so dim in the UV spectrum. So part of my day was spent emailing the program's writer (he works at NASA) seeing if he had any suggestions. Unfortunately we'd already tried what he had recommended and it just ended up blending the cluster in with the background information. So what we're going to try now is to get the images that I HASTROMed last week and run those through either GAUSS2DFIT or MPFit2dPeak using the infrared spectrum in order to get the coordinates for the cluster we're focusing on. After that we're going to remove the infrared and far UV data from the image and run the near UV image through the code using the coordinates. We need to use the HASTROMed images because that's the only way to ensure that the coordinates from the brighter infrared images will match the UV images because the Astrometry in their headers have been synchronized. We haven't been able to get this process to work yet so we're going to try again tomorrow and see if we can get it to work.

July 22

2008-07-23T06:13:00.000-07:00

Today we went to Bausch and Lomb and saw how they make their products. It was cool seeing how much computers and engineers are needed in the assembly line and I found it striking that 40 years ago you could work a manufacturing job with nothing but a high school diploma. But today, you need a Bachelor's Degree at least to work an assembly line. It's kind of cool because it shows how far our technology has come that we require such qualifications to produce such a common product.

After Bausch and Lomb and the free lunch, we went back to RIT and Basma got us to go to the meeting with Jake half way in to it. We sat there for an hour while Jake, Brad, Greg, and Brian worked out their code in idl, and then it got to us and it turns out that we didn't actually need to be there. After that I went and finished the write-ups for each of my images. The task was to highlight points of high UV or Infrared concentration and then identify any patterns in the image. I finished that up by the 5:00 meeting.

July 18

2008-07-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

Today I worked all day on finishing up the Infrared/ Near UV/ Far UV image set. I got it done around 2:30 and preceded to work on my blog. It was kind of uneventful. I did end up teaching Tom and Nicole how to do the process that Jake showed me yesterday. Nicole's images were a little different from mine and she ran into problems with number of pixels and resolution. Tom ran into problems to but I didn't care enough to pay attention.

July 17

2008-07-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

The anagram on the board this morning was for astoria. Astoria, NY in queens is home to the museum of the moving image. Also, astoria is written on a piece of paper on the plaque in the lobby. It's a tiny piece of paper on the plaque but we still found it. After that, I spent the day trying to figure out how to get the HASTROM code to work. When we figured it out we tried to resize the Infrared fits images to the size of the UV images. Later I found out though that that was unnecessary. So I spent the rest of the day fooling around with the HASTROMed images to try and get them to fit on top of each other. At the end of the day Jake came in and saved me. Turns out that I need to save the header in with the image when using the WRITE_FITS command.

July 16

2008-07-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

Today was spent figuring out the command that Jake gave me to set the astrometry of the UV and the IR images equal to each other. I didn't actually figure it out but I'd like to think I learned a lot in the process. In the end I asked Jake and it turns out that I didn't set the fit files' headers to variables correctly. I was using the wrong syntax. Like every other day. Every other depressing day. Eventually though, I asked Jake and it finally clicked. At this point though I found out that the files that I got were not in the same format as the UV files I'm trying to overlap them with so I went through and isolated the portion of the files that I want to work with. However, then I found out that I needed to resize the IR images using the congrid function on idl. This is where I ended my day and I plan to finish that up tomorrow and start overlapping the images.

July 15

2008-07-15T12:57:00.000-07:00

This morning we went on a tour of the remote sensing department. The cameras that we saw were extremely interesting and the work seemed exciting because it is directly working with a problem with a local company. I remember that he mentioned an opportunity for volunteering which I would be interested if it works into the astronomy schedule. The rest of the day I spent working on overlaying the infrared, near UV, ad far UV images on top of each other to form one image. However, at the meeting with Chris, Jake, and Stefi I found out that I was doing it wrong. The rest of the day was spent trying to find a more accurate way of overlaying the images.

July 14

2008-07-15T06:24:00.000-07:00

Today I worked on trying to overlap the far UV data images, the near UV data images, and the Infrared images for the A1767 cluster. The far data was set to blue, the near data was set to green, and the Infrared Data was set to red. The problem that we tried to solve for most of the day was tweaking the images to fit on top of each other. While the two UV images fit each other without any tweaking, they didn't line up with the Infrared Image. There was a lot of rotating, resizing, and adjusting the amount of pixels involved in trying to match up the images. By the time the five o'clock meeting came, I'd finished with 1 out of 38 images.

July 11

2008-07-11T10:52:00.000-07:00

If I could be anything when I grow up, I'd be the CEO of a 100 billion dollar multi-national who dabbled in Physics in his spare time. If I could be anyone on the list however, I would be the Polymer Scientist. The main attraction to the job was the fact that I'd be working in the Research and Development of materials that have the potential to change everything from the way toys are made to the way buildings are built. This type of work in which my actions are directly furthering progress, even if only in a small way, is extremely appealing.
Today I finished up compiling the far UV data and the near UV data into one, multi-colored image, to let them be more easily analyzed. I did this individually for 38 files and the final images can be seen on FLickr. There's a link to them on my page of the Astronomy Summer Research Team Wiki.

July 10

2008-07-10T11:10:00.000-07:00

This morning we did this thing with our eyes adjusting to the dark. We sat in a dark room until our pupils dilated. Then we covered up one of our eyes and walked outside in the light so that the other pupil contracted to let in less light. When we walked back into the dark room we uncovered our eye and the pupil was still dilated letting us see better in the dark. The rest of the day was spent trying to figure out how to save images using idl in color.

July 9

2008-07-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

Today the files finally transferred and I was able to get to work. After learning how to access files in IDL I worked on identifying clusters in the different fits files for the AIS_10. Once that was done, meand Nicole worked on setting the near UV light files and the far UV light files to different colors using IDL. Once that was done we layered the two pictures on top of each other and worked on saving the Images as one image. We found out how to save the combined images as one image but it didn't save in color so tomorrow we're going to find out how to save the images in color.

July 8

2008-07-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

Today we were assigned to undergrads to work with and we were given our official assignments. I'm working on comparing the UV pictures of galactic clusters with infrared pictures to roughly determine the energy emitted by each cluster. At the start of the day we transfered the files and pictures from Brad's account to mine. This is actually still going on though. It's taking a really long time. While it was copying I helped set up the Astronomical Imaging department's Wiki page for the Undergrads and interns. Afterwords I worked out of the tutorial for IDL to familiarize myself with the program for tomorrow.

First day

2008-07-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

The day started out with us getting to know everyone in the big barn. The games helped out with names a lot. It was cool seeing Dave there. Really surprised. Afterwords we went to the crossroads cafe and it was pretty cool. I'm a big fan of free meals. After that we took a really long tour of the Campus and saw just about anywhere that we could possibly get food. The tour of the Imaging Sciences labs was pretty interesting and it helped to see what the other groups would be doing. After that we had a meeting with our advisors to assign work. I liked how laid back it was. The department seems pretty flexible as far as work goes and that's really helpful.