Day 18

Another day at the office...Today the interns from UR came to visit. They toured around to everyones labs learning what really what went down at CIS. They're doing more of a biology focused internship at UR. I believe something dealing with neuro-science. I'll find out exactly tomorrow when we go to visit them. We also had lunch with them, free pizza, a definite plus.

As for work that I accomplished today, I finished converting the red and green flux's to Jansky, which was extremely tedious. And that was only the red and green images so I'm still going to have to convert the other wave-lengths..

Today I also helped out in the color science building. They needed volunteers for research so I gave up an hour of my day to look through a series of images and grade them on overall image quality. Not a bad way of getting paid if I may say so. I got free chocolate to do it and I'm not one to pass up chocolate!



-basma

Day 17

This morning we started off the day with a tour of the color science building. It was pretty cool, they were once in the imaging science building but they grew so they got their own place. The guy who gave us our tour told us its mainly graduate students in the dept so if any of us wanted to go into color science it'd probably be for grad school. Color science, despite popular belief, is not merely the science of color. That would be colorology according to our tour guide. Color science deals more with taking images from your computer or whatever your displaying it on and perfecting the color so that when you printed your image it wouldn't be distorted and would match the exact shade that you had on your computer. Or at least that's part of it. They seemed pretty chill in the color science building, seeing how they had a room with only a ping pong table and some rolling stones magazines..

We came back to CIS and I got back to recording the photflam data for the UGC galaxies (which I would soon find out that it was completely unnecessary). Coffee today was prety hilarious. Only Brad, Tom, and Nicole came so we were the only ones who go to experience the amazing 80's music that java was blasting... I'm pretty sure they took the worst songs of the 80's and put it on one super mix. Rockin' saxophone solo's, excellent percussion..what more can be said.

Lunch was at noon because we had our meeting with Stefi at one. At the meeting I actually got some kind of idea of what to do with the photflam/flux issue. After the meeting I used the flux equation that I found online to calculate each flux in Jansky. Jake helped with that, hopefully by the end of the week I'll have calculated all of those for each galaxy. Maybe I'll have some type of plot graphed by friday...but lets not get ahead of ourselves.


Now that I've written my longest blog so far, I do believe its almost time for our 5 o'clock meeting.

-basma

Day 16

Hopefully today wasn't a preview of what the week is going to be like because if it is I'm in for quite the week...My morning was pretty slow. I reviewed the assignment that Jake told me to do and realized that I had no clue how to tackle it. So, I emailed Bryan in hopes that he would have internet access wherever he is. Sadly, i found out that he forgot to bring the charger for his laptop so it appears that Bryan is out of the picture for the week which means Jake will be my go to person for the week which means that I'll be thoroughly confused seeing how Jake is constantly busy. Oh well...I did manage to find the photflam of the original UGC galaxies (with help from Jake).


In non-astro related news, I participated in an eye tracking experiment this afternoon. I had to look at a stream of images and click on certain points that I saw. It wasn't too bad and it did not take too long. I'll have to go back in a few weeks for some type of before and after experiment.



basma

Day 15

Friday! Today was a pretty good day. Jake gave me a list of new assignments to tackle which will definitely keep me busy for the next week or so. He wants me to create a graph of peak flux vs. wavelengths for each of the galaxies. Eventually I'd the find the luminosity distances to each galaxy and convert the fluxes into luminosities. Not exactly sure what it all means but I'm going to have to figure it out by myself because Bryan wont be here next week to assist me.. I spent most of my day finding the peak flux of each galaxy. I wish I had known about it before because I could have easily found it when I first went through the galaxies and ran gauss2dfit, but nonetheless it had to be done.

Today was also team building day. Zosimo brought in a set a domino's and told us how to play some weird game but we somehow ended up playing cards..It was in the second floor library so there was a lot random stuff to play around with like the nerf guns that were under the couch..I like nerf.


-basma

Day 13

So today I left early to take my road test...wish I could say that i passed but that wasn't the case. When I got back we went to the lunch talks. It was cool because they presentation was projected on all the walls of the auditorium. Free pizza was also a plus. I spent the majority of the afternoon finishing my write up for the ugc galaxies. Basically just wrote down points of interest for each galaxy. We were supposed to have our make-up team building from last week today, but mother nature thought she'd rain our parade. ha ha ha...Playing outside in thunderstorms doesn't exactly sound to appealing so thats that.




-basma

Day 12

Today we went on a field trip to Baush and Lomb. We go to see how they made contact lenses, met a bunch of engineers, and saw the work that went on in their on site clinic. I'd love to give more detail however I fear I may expose some valuable trade secrets and think it best to leave it at that.

When we returned to RIT we went to our Tuesday meeting upstairs in the insight lab. Basically sat there while Brad, Bryan, and Greg worked on code stuff with Jake...There may have been a slight possibility of certain interns falling asleep but I can't say for sure. Jake told me to look through all my colored images and look for trends with in them. I opened them all up on word and used the circle tool to circle important looking parts. I haven't gone through all of them yet but I suspect I'll finish it tomorrow morning.

Meeting time is soon so, bye!


basma

Day 11

Today was very productive! yay! I finished adding color to all the UGC galaxies. It took forever because every galaxy has different wave-lengths; some more than others. I had to use different combinations of wave-lengths but in the end they came out looking pretty cool. If anyone wants to see them see the link below. I updated my flickr account with the completed images and put it up on the wiki. Jake will be happy...He loves that wiki.

Tomorrow all the interns are going on a field trip to Baush and Lomb. It'll be pretty interesting. We have to wear some type of gown/cap thing...That'll be funny for sure. Plus we get free lunch tomorrow so thats always awesome. Meeting is soon so I better get going.



-basma


P.s. If I have to hear any more arguments about the pros and cons of kevin's prius, I may just lose my mind...I'm not joking.



http://insight-research.pbwiki.com/Basma-Eid

Day 10

I left early Friday morning so there's not too much to say. I started adding color to the UGC galaxies that I had been working with before. Still layering them and what not. I put the ones I did on my flickr account. I Left at about 11 so I didn't have too much time to work. This past weekend I did a soccer camp at U of R and it started friday Morning hence the leaving early.

day 9

Today was pretty decent, work wise. Bryan was very helpful and figured out the remaining UGC galaxies that had yet to be deciphered. I added that new data to the spreadsheet and calculated the area's for the recently discovered galaxies. After lunch I began my new task of adding color to the galaxies, which required learning a new program for IDL (yay). You can either add blue, green, or red to the image. I'm overlaying three wavelengths, such as red, green, and, x-ray, for each galaxy. I'm not exactly sure what wavelengths should be done for each galaxy, I'll check with Jake at the meeting. I also learned to save those newly colored images as j peg images. They'll eventually be up on flickr..

Oh yeah, this morning Bob put up a word scramble on the board during our morning meeting. Unscrambled the word spelled out "Astoria". Our job was to find out what the significance of the word was to RIT. Well we found a plaque that had Carlson (building is named after him) holding something that said Astoria on it...Not entirely sure what the importance of it but i'm assuming it has to do with Carlsons life. In 1938, Carlson "succeeded in obtaining his first 'dry-copy' in Astoria NY" (http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/carlson.htm).



-basma

Day 8

I'm not going to lie, today was a very umm a very slow day. Bryan wasn't here today so I was completely clueless as to what to do with the remaining ugc galaxies. Didn't see Jake till lunch at noon. He told me to email him the files of said galaxies. Emailed him and waited for a response. He's teaching classes all day so I guess its not surprising that I have yet to hear from him. I spent some time reading up on IDL, gauss2dfit, that got boring pretty fast so I decided to finally put my spreadsheet on the wiki. Despite the fact that its not completely finished I decided I'd rather have an unfinished spreadsheet up than nothing at all...Perhaps before 5 o'clock I'll find something to do so that when Jake asks what I've done all day I can say something that doesn't include facebook or stoneage sam....




-basma

day 7

This morning we started off with a tour of building 17, the remote sensing lab. It was cool, they had camera's that could detect gases. They're working with RGE to find gas leaks and such. After the mini-tour went back to working on my spreadsheet for the UGC galaxies. I essentially finished it with a few exceptions. Out of all the images there were about 10 that were giving me some problems so they have yet to make the spreadsheet...

After lunch we had our weekly meeting with Stephi and Chris. Told them what I had been working on, lucky for me they didn't ask many questions. After the meeting, Bryan and I started to tackle the problem galaxies. Some of them had their center points off, so we altered the window so it would give us the correct points. That was pretty much as far as I got for today. I'm going to have to check with Jake to see what happens next and how to deal with those galaxies that were not cooperating...


so long,
basma

Day 6

Mondays...well, I can't say that I love them but today wasn't too bad. Had a pretty slow morning. After Coffee I spent the afternoon calculating the area's of the ellipses (for each galaxy). The area of an ellipse is the length of the major axis times the length of the minor axis, in case you were wondering. After that I was kind of clueless as what to do next so I ventured upstairs to look for Bryan but ran across Jake instead. He told me to make a spreadsheet of all the data I'd collected so far. Yes! My favorite thing...excel. Seeing how I've never really used excel I was kinda just going off what I could figure out from just looking at it. Looked some stuff up on google and Nikki helped too. Hopefully this spreadsheet wont come out to terrible...I wouldn't be surprised if after I finish it I come to find out that its completely wrong(thats just my kind of luck).


g'day

basma

Day 5

Friday! Woot made it through the first week and I've got to say that it wasn't completely over my head! The morning meeting was good, mainly due to Bob bringing in delicious donuts...I spent the day finishing looking at all the ugc galaxies and recording their centers and such. Not exactly sure what Jake wants me to do now that I'm done, figure I'll check on that at the 5 o'clock meeting.

Lunch was good, ordered piatza's(mm buffalo chicken pizza). We were supposed to do our team building today but not sure if thats going to happen, weather's been a bit rainy but we'll see.

As for the assignment that we were assigned this morning(pick a job of the bulletin board that you'd want to do), I'd want the job as the ethnographer. It sounded the least boring out of all of the listed jobs and there's a lot of human interaction(not that I don't love staring at a computer all day or anything).

TGIF!
basma

Day 4

So todays morning meeting was pretty interesting. Bob took us to a dark lab and we all had to just sit in the dark for about 8 minutes so our eyes could adjust to the settings. We then were told to attempt to walk around the room with out walking into anyone or anything for that matter(a lot of equipment). After successfully making it around the room and back to my original seat, Bob told us to cover one eye completely and he then made us walk around the second floor with one eye covered and the other open. After our walk we returned back to the room and were told to open the eye that had been shut. Because the eye that had been shut was used to the darkness and the uncovered eye had already adjusted to the light, we could see through the covered eye much better...thats all I've got to say about that

Back in the the astro-world, I pretty much spent the entire day doing the same thing as yesterday, working with 2dgauss. Still have about less than half to go so hopefully that'll be done by monday..


so long,
basma

Day 3

So another day down. Today I learned a new application on IDL, gauss2dfit, which pretty much lets you see the brightest part of the galaxy and allows you to calculate the center of each image(I think). Eventually I'm going to have to figure out the area of each galaxy...that'll be fun. We tried to get free pizza at the lecture today, but of course when we got there, there was no more pizza. Super. So after we went to the Ritz to get lunch. Had to wait like 20 minutes for my panini...not cool(hah didn't even mean for that one to happen). Came back to the lab, continued my quest on IDL and thats pretty much it. Rest of the week shouldn't be too bad, at least now I've got a general idea of what needs to be done...

adieu,
basma

Day 2

So today was my first actual "work" day. Jake paired me up with Bryan to work on the UGC project. Basically I spent the morning copying files from Bryan's folder to mine. The copying wasn't too bad considering I'd never used IDL or a sun computer before (Bryan helped). The files I copied were a bunch of images that Bryan had used last year. The galaxies were pretty cool, especially when you could see the same image at a different wave lengths.

Then I experienced my first coffee break, which consisted of Jake getting some coffee and Chris drinking way too much espresso. We all kinda just sat there until we had to go back to work. Perhaps tomorrow during coffee I'll bug Brad and Bryan about team building stuff because apparently one of my jobs for the summer is to nag the team builders to get team building events together.

After coffee we went back to Carlson and kinda hung out for 20 minutes because lunch was at 12 today. On Tuesdays we have meetings at one, hence the early lunch. Lunch was alright, crowded and rushed as usual. The meeting at one was basically for the undergrads to tell Stephi what they've been working on. Stephi is one of the big kahuna's of astronomical imaging apparently so its probably wise to be on her good side. She seemed pretty nice so I'm good.

After that the fun really started. We went to the downstairs lab and pretty much spent the entire afternoon messing around on IDL. I was basically trying to view all the images in appropriate windows, messing around with the arrays so that I actually saw something other than just a black screen. At the point Bryan and I didn't really know what I was supposed to be doing for Jake so I kinda just played with IDL for the day.

Had our daily 5 o'clock meeting, shared what we were doing all day. Jake explained to Bryan what I was actually going to be doing(which I still don't really know) but I do know that tomorrow will probably be less chill than today.

And so it goes,
basma

Day 1

Alrighty then...today was my first official day as an intern here at RIT. We started the morning off with our daily meeting, which I of course was late to (RIT time is ahead of normal time), basically Bob and Joe gave us the quick run down of our day. We went to the red barn, did a bunch of "ice-breaker" activities. Then we went to lunch at crossroads, had a pretty decent quesadilla. Next a couple undergrads took us on a tour of basically the entire campus...good times there. Came back to Carlson, met with Jake and other astronomers, found out what kind of projects they're working on. Jake assigned us our projects (basically), downloaded "putty" and "Xming" on the laptops(took forever) and then essentially hung out for 20 minutes. Now we've got our 5 o'clock meeting with everyone else upstairs.

Until Tomorrow,
basma

hello world

Well, that took entirely way too long...Can't say I've ever thought so hard on coming up with a name for a blog, which will detail my internship this summer at the Center for Imaging Science at RIT, but it did because I'm a sucker for corny play on words. I'll be working on astronomy-related imaging (not that I know what that means) but it's definitely going to be interesting. I don't start till Monday so we shall see...