Today was partially a traveling day. When those happen in Europe, it impresses me with how smoothly their public transit system works. Granted, I was traveling on a Sunday morning, so crowds were nonexistent. First, bus from the hotel to Leiden Centraal. Then, after a few minutes wait, I caught this train:
Less than fifteen minutes later, I was underneath Schipol. After a slightly longer wait, I boarded an intercity train bound for Groningen, found a window seat and plopped down for the ride. It was raining a bit near Amsterdam, but it thinned out as we made our way east. A little over 2 hours after leaving Leiden, I was in Hoogeveen. A quick taxi ride to ASTRON and here I am!
There are only three of us in the guest house, so things are relatively quiet. I expect they’ll pick up tomorrow though. I’ll be spending the next 5 days here, hopefully finishing up a paper. I was awarded some time on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, and coincidentally, the first observations will take place on Wednesday! I’m looking forward to seeing those results.
Photos from a few hours walking around Den Haag (The Hague).
View the rest of the pictures here: Den Haag on flickr
Ok, maybe just a couple sentences… I spent a few hours today walking around Leiden and exploring the older, central part of town. Nice sights. Below are a few of my favorite pictures from the day. Follow the link at the bottom to see the rest!
See the rest of the pictures: Leiden on flickr
Contrary to what the time on the blog post says, it’s 9:30am where I am. A few hours ago, I landed in Leiden for a week-long workshop on powerful radio galaxies. It’s going to be an exciting and interesting conference, but I must admit that I just really want to sleep right now. I managed to get ~5 hours of sleep on the plane, but as anyone who’s slept on a plane knows, it’s not “real” sleep.
And speaking of planes, I took a train from Amsterdam to Leiden and concluded (not for the first time and probably not for the last time), that trains are a much more civilized way to travel. It’s nice to go somewhere and not be shoe-horned in with 300 other people. But, trains aren’t as fast and in the US, they’re never on time. So I guess the price of losing civility is gaining time at your destination (if you even get there at all on Amtrak!).
But before I ramble too much, I’m going to go for a run and start the day by exploring town. My hope as the week goes on is to post some things about the conference here, but most likely, all I’ll have time to do is tweet on occasion. If you’re interested in the program it is available here: Program Powerful Radio Galaxies: Triggering and Feedback.
I am still working on writing a paper. My hope is to have another draft out to my collaborators by the end of the week. Over the last two days, one of the major time investments has been making figures. They are deceptively difficult to do well (and I am sure I haven’t yet mastered that). Figures are generally the best way of showcasing data, whether it be showing images, the amount of energy emitted by an object as a function of wavelength, or showing trends in properties of objects. (“A picture is worth a thousand words”).
One of the difficulties is making a figure which conveys a lot of information in the most clear, eloquent way possible. And, it has to be legible. That last part is what I am struggling with now. I have a format for images of each galaxy in my sample which fairly clearly shows what I want (how the source looks on the sky and how the gas is moving in the galaxy). The difficulty is compressing all that information into a figure which doesn’t take up a whole page, but still allows the reader to see the labels on the graphs. It is a fine balancing act.. too small a font and it can’t be read, too large a font, and everything overlaps and it can’t be read.
But, after a few more hours of time investment into them, I think the figures will be ready to do. Which is good, because I want to have a poster draft done by Thursday morning too….
