It’s been a slow week on the research front. Most of my time has been consumed grading tests and labs in addition to homework assignments. Fortunately I’m grading the T/F page of the tests, so that goes rather quickly.
Lately I’ve been working on calibrating data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Once that’s done we should be able to start into the actual analysis of the data. This will involve working out some of the physics of interaction between radio jets and gas inside the galaxy we’re studying.
I’ve also been working on some new projects. One is looking for neutral gas in groups of galaxies, and the other involves black hole masses of distant quasars. Both projects are in the initial stages, but they should be quite interesting.
The sleep cycle for the last 24 hours has been a bit interesting. I went to bed last night at 9pm. Slept until 1:30am, then got up and went into work to do a half-night of remote observing on the APO 3.5m telescope. We had very nice weather, although quite a lot of variety in “seeing”. In the 4 hours alotted, my advisor and I observed several high-redshift quasars and some Seyfert Galaxies. We wrapped up our observing program at about 8am Charlottesville time. The Apollo Lunar Ranging Progam was set to go next, so they had the last hour of the night.
Ordinarily, we would take calibration data following the end of our run, but since there was another observing program at the end, we had to wait until after they had finished to do wavelength and illumination calibration for the spectrograph. We could have done it before their program, but we would have lost ~45 minutes of observing time, so instead we waited until morning.
Taking calibration data wrapped up around 9:30am, after which I proceeded directly to my office and went to sleep on the sofa. My officemates began to filter in for the next hour or so, occasionally commenting on the “body on the sofa”. I finally roused myself just before 11am and went to work. Fortunately, my day today was fairly light, with a “Compact Objects” discussion session (“Compact Objects” refers to things such as X-ray binaries, neutron stars, black holes, and the like) and the High Energy Astrophysics class.
I headed home at 6, having consumed near 2L of Mountain Dew since 5am in my efforts to stay awake. Figuring it would be futile to attempt to work, I got into bed around 7, and slept for an hour and a half.
Quite an interesting sleep cycle eh? ~6 hours in 3 blocks. 
I’ve been spending a lot of time this week working on a pilot study of quasars. My advisor and I had some observing time on the ARC 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory. Our 2nd half night was Thursday morning from 3-7am. It was fairly brutal in terms of not-sleeping. However, it did yield mostly good weather. We teamed up with another faculty member to share the time, so we hopped between quasars and massive young stars. Quite a range in objects. Some things as close as 6000 light years, and some as far as 30 billion light years!
Because we were observing in the near infrared, we can work until closer to sunrise. I was just starting the final calibration observations as people were coming into work. It’s always weird to be going home as everyone else is just coming into work.
With these observations, I now have data on three quasars. The data ranges in quality to almost totally useless to fairly good. I’ll start working on reducing the data here soon. Should be fun!
Well, it’s been a good past few days on the research front. I had my first meeting with my advisor in over a month and got a telescope proposal worked out for the ARC 3.5m in Sunspot, MN to get some data on high redshift quasars. I suspect we’ll hear back on the proposal in a week or two.
In addition, I’ve been working on my reduction of some [[wikpedia:Hubble Space Telescope]] data for our study of the jet-gas interaction in a seyfert galaxy. I just finished reducing the data for the final filter. Next, I’ll begin processing the images to isolate the contribution from just the emission lines (so I’ll be removing the continuum light from the stars in the galaxy). This will allow us to study the properties of the AGN by comparing the morphology and energy output in various emission lines.
Finally, I’ve obtained some data from TripleSpec of another Seyefert galaxy for a separate project. I’ve started playing around with the tool to extract the data, and have made some progress with that. Hopefully in the near future, I’ll have a nice spectra I can show off of the galaxy. I’ll try and post a nice example if one comes up.
