photometry

I guess I haven't posted anything since I finished what I was doing before.. I'm done removing noise from images (until the CD of new data from Dr. Perlman shows up), so now I'm finding the brightnesses of galaxies by comparing them to the stars around them in the images (aperture photometry). We expect the galaxies' brightnesses to vary with time, so I have to do this for every image we have since 2001, which takes a while, but isn't hard.

For some other objects, though, we don't know the magnitudes of the stars around the galaxy, so we have to do "Absolute Wide-Band Photometric Reduction", which Ken is working on because I have no idea how that goes.. it's considerably more complicated.

We had a public observing session on Saturday night because Venus and Saturn were less than a degree apart, but it was too cloudy to see anything. I did meet a family there, though, and I went to the Methodist Church with them on Sunday. I liked it a lot, and will probably go back next week. After church, they invited me for lunch and we had vegetable soup with ham.. it was delicious! They have a daughter in High School (Molly) who wants to be a physicist, and a son (Sean) who's my age (more or less). They decided they want to take me to see the attractions around here, namely the swamps and the beach in Jacksonville, so I'll probably be seeing them on several Saturdays in the coming weeks.

The Rumstays are leaving for the holiday to visit their oldest daughter, Roseanne, but I'm having dinner with them tomorrow night, and I think I'm going to bake a Key Lime Pie for that :) I got a recipe emailed to me from something or other I signed up for, and it looks like a good thing to do tonight. On the 4th, I might go see a movie .. Ocean's 13 if the major cinema is open, or 300 at the budget. Also I plan to sleep a lot :) And hopefully we'll get some rain soon!