A week and a half to go

With a week and a half to go I have been doing a lot of pair coding with Dr. Moustakas to try and fix the code that has been refactored. We meet for about 2-4 hours each week to code and I have been doing a lot of outside reading and working on my presentation to make sure that I am prepared for my talk. We also discussed doing a Brown bag next Wednesday to practice my presentation before the Rochester Symposium.

Right now we are in the homestretch and are putting on the final touches for the presentation and making the last bit of graphs from our analysis.

Telescope at Kitt Peak

Dr. Moustakas, Megan, Kevin, and I have been up at the Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak for the past two nights. We have had a fantastic Operating Assistant, Amy, here with us. The worst part about the time being here is that the weather has been terrible. Clouds, rain, ice, humidity, and wind have all kept us from observing. But that has given us time to see and learn about the telescope, how it is ran, and the dome it is kept in. We got some books and explored the building the telescope is in. Now we have just been coding and keeping up with the weather hoping for a change!

Week 5: Update

This week Dr. John Moustakas, Kevin, and Meghan prepared for our trip to Arizona. We were given access to the Desi Wikipedia page. This is to ensure that we have all the information needed to run the codes and to get the data that we will be getting while in Kitt Peak. 

We are going to Kitt Peak to observe in the telescope that will be completely gutted and renovated to hold DESI (the dark energy spectroscopy instrument). This will be to gain beginning information and data that we can use for my simulations, as well as Kevin's and Meghan's. the trip will be funded by Dr. Moustakas's NSF (National Science Foundation) grant. We will be leaving Friday into Tuesday, Observing every night we are there. The telescope Located at Kitt Peak is one of 22 operational telescopes. DESI will be conducted on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory starting in 2019 even though construction begins in 2017.

While we are there we hope to have clear skies, good weather, and a smoothe observation cycle. It will just be the four of us and I will be sure to keep this blog updated while I am there!

Week 4: Progress report

This week Dr. Moustakas and I have been working on the short paper discussing the theory behind our project and then the results of the gravitational lens detection. As I have been doing a literature search and review, Dr. Moustakas and the other collaborators on DESI have been cleaning up the codes. This is why we have not been able to get any more figures or run more simulations this semester.

We are hoping by the end of this week all of the codes we need will be up to date and we can run the simulation. Our goal is to use SDSS data and apply a redshift to the emission line galaxies, ELGs. Once that is applied we will then apply noise to the luminous red galaxy , LRG, spectra as well as the ELG spectra and then run those combined spectra through the code Red Monster to detect the gravitationally lensed ELG. This will hopefully be accomplished by next week.

Week 3: Project Update

Since Wednesday I have met with Dr. Moustakas to discuss the implementation of Python 3.5 and how it will affect our code. Dr. Moustakas is currently working on rewriting the code that creates noise in our generated spectra. I was able to do some more background reading to get information to put in the intro of a small paper we are writing. I was also able to latex the important equations and place figures we created last semester into the paper.

So far we haven't made much progress but hopefully we will tomorrow at our meeting.

Week 2: Progress Report

Since Wednesday I have met with Dr. Moustakas twice to discuss what the weekly goals were. I was able to do some more background reading to get information to put in the intro of a small paper we are writing. I was also able to latex the important equations and place figures we created last semester into the paper.

We then met on Monday to discuss the goals of the research as well as update the DESI code onto Nyx, a separate server I am able to access on my own laptop. Dr. Moustakas is currently working on rewriting the code that creates noise in our generated spectra. We are now going to code using Python 3.5 instead of Python 2.7 which has a few style changes. All of these changes will hopefully allow us to move forward on the research and continue making figures of spectra and working on papers.

I meet with Dr. Moustakas on friday to further discuss what my goals over the weekend will be.

Project Summary

I am working with Dr. Moustakas on using computer-simulated gravitationally-lensed galaxies as well as data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)to see if the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Energy survey’s (DESI) fibers will be strong enough to detect them and if the software will be available to detect them in the data. A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter, ie galaxies, between a distant light source and an observer, that bends the light from the source as the light travels towards the observer and this phenomenon has been observed much less than what is predicted. We plan on seeing how far of a red shift DESI can detect gravitational lensing - if at all. The main goal of this project is to find out that whether DESI will be strong enough or observing the night sky for a long enough time to be able to detect gravitational lenses.