I had a bit of two worlds this evening… I headed out to Moorman’s boulders after work to do a bit of climbing before the sun went down. I was feeling pretty mellow today, so I didn’t push things too hard. Worked some problems that I’d been trying before, tried some new ones, and sent some “old friends”. I went with another graduate student at UVa (though not in the astro dept!), who showed me a couple other problems there that I hadn’t tried before.. Good times all around, and minimal pain to the fingers.

After bouldering, I finished up some lab grading I’d been working on during the afternoon. Still have another lab to grade as well as a midterm for a 100 level class. Should be a busy weekend.

I’ve just wrapped up my night’s effort to reduce the data taken at the Green Bank Telescope. I am using the GBTIDL software package to reduce the data. So far I’ve only been flagging bad data in the scans of our targets. Due to the low amount of radio frequency interference (RFI) in Green Bank, only ~1 minute of total data was severely affected in the several hours of data taken! Now that I’ve got the hang of flagging obviously bad data, the next step is to calibrate the spectra using the flux calibrators observed during the run. This involves a conversion of antenna temperature (T_A which measures the strength of the signal measured by the receiver) to an actual flux value with the gain and any atmospheric opacity taken into account…

But I think it’s time to call it a night. Have a full day of meetings, classes, and talks planned for tomorrow!