019.

brown bag lunch & phoenix mars lander replica

My mentor submitted an abstract to the American Astronomical Society on one of the sources we're studying. He submitted me as a co-author for the work I've been doing. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

016.

K-band's being difficult. OH lines don't match up... try again tomorrow. H2 shouldn't be so far to the right...

Division 32 welcome reception today. JPL is past, present, and future. And overwhelming. And wonderful.

014.

EXTRACTED STAR & NEBULAR SPECTRA TODAY.

WURRRRRRRRRRRRRRD.

013.

I got sent home early today so that I don't infect/annoy people with my coughing. We're going to try reducing and calibrating with REDSPEC in IDL instead of the useless IRAF procedures I've been working on the past couple of weeks.

I just want it to be the weekend so that I can dance.

011.

new Mars rover landing vehicle

rover xing

010.

Ben Oppenheimer gave a talk during the Earth and Space Science Colloquium this morning. He's brilliant. Must be in his mid thirties, but was a co-founder of the first brown dwarf years ago, and has contributed heavily to the detection of exosolar planets. Not to mention he's funny as hell. He works at the Rose Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, so after he built his latest coronagraph (for which they tried to get Corona to sponsor), he wheeled it around the museum after hours and took pictures of it with the dinosaur skeletons and other exhibits. I love scientists with a sense of humor.

&

Some pictures from Hollywood this past weekend:

me & Michelle

Spiderman

Yeah man!

004.

I'm doing a terrible job at keeping up with Michelle. I'd like to post in this everyday, but you know how things go.


Some pictures:

my building.

my office.

badge!

rover testing.

001.

Day 2.

Yesterday was day 1. Arrived at JPL around 8:00 and sat in a conference room with all the other interns until it was time to meet my mentor. One by one they all went off into the world of rocket science while I sat and waited my turn, making small talk about building locations, M. G. Lord, and the LHC.

I finally met my mentor around 9:00, and he is the CUTEST little old Indian man. And he's brilliant. We spent a few hours going over practically everything related to the research that we will be doing on preplanetary nebulae, and I was able to follow relatively easily. Got lunch with Kathryn and then spent the afternoon reading papers until my account was set up. Left at 4:00.

This morning I downloaded star field images from the 2MASS database of our IRAS sources until 9:00 and then trekked to the badging office to get my NASA badge. It's purple. Got fingerprinted and such. Then came back and compared my mentor's HST images to the 2MASS images, and found some inconsistencies in the data, so we spent a couple of hours sorting that out and playing cat and mouse identifying sources with their spectra. Information overload, I thought my head was going to expload. Satisfying, though. Left at 5:00.

p.s. I copied Michelle by making this.