2007 September 12
Hey, awesome. I feel like I’ve done a lot today and it’s only 8 PM! Wowee!
In particular, I just sent out an email to the ATA users list summarizing my results with the antenna gains. People seemed pretty interested in the numbers, which is always encouraging. I just hope that the numbers are actually real. I’d imagine the antenna gains to be fairly constant, not bouncing around by 10%, because as far as I know they measure purely properties of the physical antenna, feed, and LNA. Actually, on the other hand, I think the system temperature plays a role too? In which case the sky temperature and all other sorts of factors could play a role. Hm.
Besides that, I also started working on my ATA observing proposal very preliminarily. I’m not sure how fully-thought-through it needs to be, but I’ll try to be as thorough as possible given the fact that it’s due on Friday and tomorrow is going to be busy.
And somehow I found the time to walk myself through the 120 lab we just assigned and verify the results for myself. Wrote a quick 1D Gaussian fit function (based on the 2D fitter I found online) and generated some pretty pictures. Nothing unexpected, but good to know that I could run through the entire lab in about an hour. Take that, undergrads! I’m still the champ!