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….
Most of work this week has focused on astronomy without much interaction with actual data. A very important part of scientific progress is writing up and publishing your results. This allows you to share discoveries with the rest of the community and advances the overall amount of knowledge.
I am near the end of several projects I have been working on lately, which means it is time to write up the results to be published. You can almost think of it as a lab report on steroids. The format can vary a bit with the author’s writing style, but papers generally include background of the topic, some information on the methods of data collection and analysis, some presentation of the data and then conclusions based on the data.
Once the paper has been written and the draft is thought to be suitable by the collaborators on the paper, it is submitted to a journal. Once it is received by the journal, it undergoes a peer review process before it is (hopefully) accepted and published. I will go into a bit more detail on those phases once I reach that stage with these papers.
Currently I am collecting the data, images and some existing text to merge into a document discussing the results. In this particular case, there is a sample of ~6 objects for which we have data. The paper will discuss the selection method for the objects, how the radio data was converted into usable images, and finally, what we have learned from the data. There will be a small subsection on each object, with another section about the collection of objects.
Currently I have a skeleton draft (written with the help of a collaborator on this project). I have spent some time over the last few days expanding the draft. Next up is to make some publication quality images and graphs displaying the data we’ve gathered. But now, back to writing! I will have more on the other parts of publishing papers as soon as I have finished writing this draft 
This past weekend I was able to join my family for 2 days in Disneyworld! We had an excellent time (how could you not?)! Aleya and I arrived late Thursday night and met up with my family and my brother’s fiancee Friday morning. We spent all of that day at EPCOT, going on rides and exploring the park.
On Saturday we got up early for Breakfast and went to the Magic Kingdom! Always a great time, we rode most of the classic rides (Pirates, Big Thunder Mountain Line, It’s a Small World). Unfortunately, Space Mountain is currently undergoing rennovations, and is scheduled to open on 21 November of this year. Just missed it!
As one would expect with a trip to Disneyworld, it was a great trip! See the rest of the pictures from the trip here: Disneyworld on flickr.
If you saw my twitter posts this morning, you might have caught some of the observing I was helping out with. As part of the continuing study of the jet-gas interaction in a Seyfert galaxy, my advisor and I noticed a possible companion galaxy. The companion is about 40 arcseconds away in projection, so it is close enough to be a potential source of gravitational interaction with the host of the Seyfert nuclei.
It is widely thought that galaxy-galaxy interactions and mergers are a major channel for the triggering of nuclear star formation and accretion onto supermassive black holes (sparking AGN activity). The Seyfert galaxy we have been studying shows signs of having undergone a recent interaction. The only problem is, we don’t know if the possible companion is actually associated, or if it is a background galaxy!
Because most galaxies are moving away from us due to the expansion of the Universe, we can use the doppler effect to learn about how fast a galaxy is moving away from us. If it is not gravitationally associated with the local collection of galaxies, we can use that velocity to determine a distance.
This morning, two first year grad students at UVa spent ~3 hours observing the companion galaxy in an effort to measure the redshift due to its recession. They are out in New Mexico as part of a trip to visit various telescope facilities UVa has access to, and to become trained on the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory. (I went on the same trip 2 years ago as well: Astronomy Ironman).
I tuned in this morning to watch the observations (which I can do over the internet, using some special software developed for the telescope). They did a great job observing and we got some data on the galaxy. It is a faint galaxy, so it will take a bit of work to test our hypothesis that it is at the same distance as our Seyfert, but we definitely see the companion in our data, so that’s good!
I have been getting out and doing a fair amount of hiking lately. In the middle of October, David and I went out for a quick night backpacking in St. Mary’s Wilderness. The quick in and out trip was a fun time. The predicted snow didn’t materialize in any strong fashion, which was probably best. Although, we were both looking forward to seeing some sign of winter. I uploaded a few pictures from that backpack:
St. Mary’s Wilderness on flickr
Later that weekend, Ryan, Tang and I hiked the Rivanna Trail around Charlottesville. This ~20 mile trail encircles the city and spends an impressive amount of time in forested areas. The trail is also fairly flat, so other than sore feet, the hike wasn’t overly challenging. We managed to hike the whole thing in just over 8 hours (plus a short stop at David’s for apple pie! 
).
Rivanna Trail on flickr
The most recent backpacking trip was a little over a week ago. Several of us headed down to Tennessee to do some backpacking in the Smoky Mountains. We started out with a Friday hike along the AT, from Newfound Gap to Clingman’s Dome.
It was a fun 8 miles, with some solid elevation gain! After reaching Clingman’s Dome, we shouldered our backpacking gear and headed down the trail. The weather was misty, but not quite raining (yet). After dropping down another 2000+ ft, we camped near the creek.
It began raining in the middle of the night and kept up all day Saturday. We hiked back up the trail we came, aiming to meet up with the Ridge trail and continue along the loop. However we ended up with soaked gear and clothes, so we abandoned the hike. Despite the rain, everyone had a good time. We’ll be back again I’m sure…
The rest of the pictures from the Smokies are online here: Smoky Mountains National Park on flickr
