2007 September 5
Took care of a lot of odds and ends today. Did a little more analysis of ATA gains — swallowed my pride and used Gnuplot to make a histogram of the calculated antenna gains. Which at least had the useful effect of reminding me why I wrote OmegaPlot in the first place. Anyway, there’s apparently another similar data set available, so I’ll find gains for that and hopefully things won’t be wildly different.
Went down to the basement to be shown how to use the Nickel’s remote observing capabilities by Franck Marchis. Unfortunately, there’s a wildfire near Lick right now, so we weren’t able to open the dome. On the other hand, that gave us an excuse to spend time getting a bunch of dome flats. We’ll use these for the next lab; the students will use the frames that we took to make a classic CCD linearity plot. From our quick look at the data, this will be a snap.
Did some reading for Galactic Dynamics and picked a problem, but didn’t really pay much attention. There was a bunch of math with potentials, and, like Thea (dead blog link removed), it turns out I don’t think I know how to calculate surface densities. That’s about the extent of what I absorbed from it.
Looked at the Star Formation problem set. Looks like a good set (yes, I feel like I have an eye as to the quality of the construction of a problem set by now) though probably going to be more work than I’d prefer. But ain’t that always how it is.