This week has been full of great progress on Dolphot, bounding closer to the goal of making Color-Magnitude Diagrams of NGC6819. The only problem is it is one of our last weeks! I wish we had a few more weeks to work together on this project before school started, but alas, the summer is cruelly short every time.

Before returning to Colorado I was really baffled by the dolphot output, the idea of figuring out anything from a quarter of a million rows of data was daunting. When I returned and Thom confirmed that his Dolphot output looked similar, it was heartening, and it felt good to be back to working with a team where we could bounce ideas off of each other and work together. In the four days since I returned, I learned how to use the text-proccessing utility awk to pare the list down to only rows with certain values. I spent a lot of time thinking about what values would be best to use for this source selection, and tried a few different combinations. I wrote a code to display the selected sources on their reference image and found that the source picking algorithm was no good.

So that’s where I am now, looking for a few thousand needles in a haystack of a few hundred thousand possible needles. It’s hard to plan for next week and my final few days as often progress comes in fits and starts, and sometimes small hurdles take multiple days to surmount, while sometimes I can get through a dozen hurdles in a day.

The conclusion of my research is accelerated due to the fact that I am leading a new student orientation trip and need to attend a training for leaders at the end of this week and next week. While I don’t want to push too many research responsibilities into that time, I think due to the lack of nice results, and the need to complete a poster I will have to spend some time during those days working on this project before and after the training sessions.

I also want to begin considering finding presentable results. Up to now, much of my time has been devoted to trying to understand confusing programs. I hope to pivot within the next few days to creating diagrams that show a sort of synthesis of some of the work that we have done. I really hope to be able to make accurate color-magnitude diagrams primarily. Thom and I are working now on the Dolphot data, and once we pare it all down to the real stars, we just need to match stars of different filters and plot them in python.

I think this goal is attainable. The only part I am really uncertain about right now is matching the stars in different filter bands, this is something that Marta has worked on this summer, so I will be able to use her blog as a resource to figure this out.

I will take this space to make a day-by-day plan for wrapping up the project.

Monday 8/13 Read papers that utilize dolphot, see what they say about source discretion. (Try more SNR discretion) By the end of the day have accurate source lists for every hubble field If extra time work on matching stars from different filters/exposures

Tuesday 8/14 work on matching stars from different filters/exposures work on Color Mag Diagram python code by the end of the day have color-magnitude diagrams for all hubble fields (or one big combined CM diagram)

Wednesday 8/15 wrap up loose ends from past two days Begin work on poster, talk with group about anything else that needs to be done for project completion, good things to have for our posters (graphics, tables, pictures) By the end of the day have a plan for poster layout

Thursday 8/16 Training: about 10 hrs Work on writing poster pieces if time

Friday 8/17 Training: about 10 hrs Work on writing poster pieces if time

Saturday 8/18 Training: about 10 hrs Work on writing poster pieces if time

Sunday 8/19 Training: about 4 hrs Finish Writing text of poster

Monday 8/20 Training: about 4 hrs finish poster layout

Tuesday 8/21 Training: about 4 hrs Complete poster loose ends Finish Poster, turn in to Dr. G/whoever else needs it

Wednesday 8/22 Leave for NSO trip