Well, the halfway mark is here. I feel I have made good progress. This week followed last week's theme of learning: 1) Ants rule the world, B) Fortran is a difficult language, lastly, Valentine's Day isn't celebrated in Chile.
The week began with tea then we had a presentation by my advisor Hugo Schwarz on the SOAR telescope. The projector was cutting off some of the image of his nifty powerpoint presentation, but I had already seen it so it didn't bother me. The SOAR telescope is very cool. The techniques and design used in constructing every part of it are new. I especially like how the mirror is made out of hexagonal shaped pieces of glass, then heated up to mend together into one, and then placed on a mold and heated again to mold into the desired shape and f-ratio. Wow! It is a really cool design, I am surprised it wasn't thought of earlier.
Sometime this week I came home and found all of my roomate's food scattered throughout the house- on tables, chairs, previously unused shelves- and I thought to myself, that's strange, then I entered the kitchen and saw millions of dead ants scattered throughout the kitchen area. I quickly fell to my knees and sobbed in mourning of my friend Andy who was among the victims. But apparently the ants made a sudden move into our kitchen and quickly became a nuisance. It must have happened overnight or something, cause they weren't there before, at least I never saw them. Well, the effort put forth by my roomates effectively herded the ants toward my room and now I have my own ant problem.
On Tuesday we learned about the TAC and Observing Proposals, it was an Astronomy Class. It was good. Very informative. Bottom line seems to be: Go to a school that has their own telescope. Or be a Chilean. Wednesday hosted the first ever session of the CTIO journal club. The article was on using gravitationally lensed stars to pinpoint the location of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. Very cool, however, too much Probability!
I learned Fortran. Well, that's a tall statement, I am learning Fortran. I've written a program that reads photometric data from a file and computes the Luminosity of the object at a given distance. The next step is to edit the program to call SuperMongo to make an Energy Distribution plot and a table of the data. Woo hoo! I like programming and learning new languages!