The past few weeks have been quite busy. There has not been much time to do actual research, but I have spent lots of time thinking about science. An array of proposals have been due over the past few weeks, from large radio telescopes (Westerbork, VLA) to large optical telescopes (Gemini) to small telescopes (Bok 90″ on Kitt Peak). About an hour ago I submitted the last proposal for a month or two. I have asked for a decent chunk of time to obtain optical and radio data to support my PhD thesis. I will hear back on some of the allocation requests next week or the week after, but some will take until December. I am anxious to find out, but I have plenty to keep me busy over the next few months.

My main order of business starting next week is to write papers. I have two or three research projects which are close to completion and need to written up for publication. So I will be setting aside any new work for the time being to tie up loose ends on these projects. More on those as they progress along…

This afternoon I continued my work on a Seyfert galaxy. Last week, while waiting for proposal comments from collaborators, I measured strengths of emission lines at various places in the galaxy. Using ratios between different elements or different transitions of a specific element, we can learn something about the physical conditions (temperature, density) of the gas! Quite cool. So today I continued working on the raw data, making plots of some interesting ratios. That will give us an opportunity to see if we see any changes in the physical conditions with location in the galaxy. The small plotting portion is done now and will wrap up my week. Off to the weekend! More on that after it has happened