Friday, December 27, 2013

2013 in Review

It's that time of year again (Birthday, Christmas, New Year's eve) and most websites and news outlets are doing it. How has the year been?

I had to compile it anyway as part of leaving-ESA and I am pretty happy. I had nine (!) successful principal investigator telescope proposals and five as co-author.
As a first author, I had four papers and thirteen as co-author. Pretty productive. More of course are submitted or nearly ready to go.

I started a new job with Rychard Bouwens. Life in the fast lane of high-redshift. Suits me so far. It's very interesting, even if I am playing catchup here and there.

So professionally very ok. I would like to cut down the time it takes me to write papers (I am just a slow writer) or get various things done but who doesn't? Probably shutting Facebook more is a thought...

Paradoxically, my other new year' resolution is to blog more. Oh well, we will see.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Brace for Rejection

Astronomers have to make a lot of pitches: observing proposal pitches, pitches for funding, job applications. Maybe not as many as some professions (hello car salesperson) but more than others.
And the chances range from 30% down to less than 1% of being successful, i.e., 30% is for time on crappy  unpopular observatories, 1% is for that job everyone wants (AstroSanta).

This translates into a lot of "Thank you for your interest" and "We regret to inform you" emails (and letters still sometimes). There is a lot of disappointment in the work. It is inherent to a profession that is creative and to a level, competative. There is no infinite amount of funding, there is an infinite amount of interesting Universe out there.

I have become quite Zen about it (ask me again when this postdoc is running out) and in part this is because the writing by Will Wheaton. He is in a creative profession. He pitches himself a lot. He gets rejected a lot (like every time right after Star Trek it seems). But he stuck with it.

But the importance of the sales pitch and the inherent rejection is something we might want to warn starting grad students about.



Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Second Week on the New Job: life beyond ALMA

Second week at the new job. As a general purpose monkey versatile astronomer, I was thrown two new projects pretty much immediately. Welcome to the Jungle high-redshift Universe!

It is actually quite interesting. Trouble is that is feels like one of those things that should not take a a lot of time...and yet it does. Re-learning galfit for example...

Meanwhile, I thought of an idea to work on S4G. And in a brief email exchange, this idea was indeed vetted as worthwhile. Ho hm.

Wrote up my LEAPS project. It will be fun to have a student next summer.

But the highlight of the day was the family visiting (together with bagles for lunch).

Monday, December 2, 2013

New Job. New Proposals. And awesome ESA going away presents

I started my new job at the University of Leiden's Sterrenwacht. Hurray! Made it in bright & early this morning to get a good jumpstart on the day. As the only one it felt.
Never mind. It gave me some time to hack more on my ALMA proposals. Most Astronomers I know seem to frantically working through all the cool stuff they could do with it and getting headaches from working in Janskies and frequency instead of good ol' flux and wavelength in equal measure.

New "temporary" office (we all know what temporary in this context can mean, i.e., I won't decorate for a year and they'll move me 3 minutes after I do) has some interesting new office-mates. Two guys from North Korea! huh. On loan to the physics department I guess. And a rather random historian from time to time. okay...

I got the seat by the window. My laptop is set up now (mostly) and ALMA is due on December 5, an hour an a half after Sinterklaas arrives at the department (candy? proposal? candyproposal?).
One down and one more proposal to go. Game on!

My perky attitude is helped tremendously by the cool presents I got when leaving ESA from all the "beautiful people" (Guido included): a seriously awesome ESA jacket, fleece and dustpan. The last one because of my abiding interest in Dust.

which brings me back to ALMA! 

Thursday, November 14, 2013

ALMA day at Leiden University

Spent the morning listening how much awesome the ccle-2 ALMA will be. And brainstorming on higher-redshifts proposals. Rychard is gently getting me to his domain of z=10 by getting me to write a lower redshift proposal first. No fear. I have two other ideas in the can as well.

Meanwhile SOFIA observations need to be scheduled. How to fit 1300 minutes of time into an allotment of 720...

Not much else but I decided to blog again. Won't my single reader be happy.

Friday, November 1, 2013

SOFIA

Almost on a whim, I put in a proposal to complement my NHEMESES Herschel program with SOFIA observations. SOFIA is the NASA airborne observatory. A telescope onboard a Boing 747. I figured it would be heavily oversubscribed but always ask. And there is an observer seat onboard. How nice would it be to go on *that* observing trip! I got 10 hours of observing time, a complete flight!


Thursday, September 5, 2013

Sixth Night

Well technically not my sixth night observing but I am readjusting to normal day/night rythm.
Good news this morning: the S4G morphology paper was accepted. On astro-ph here
(starting Friday). That merited a happy dance. I should have a look at the follow-up as well tomorrow.

Meanwhile some work on a Lorentz center proposal and the SoeperSecretProject (that I tweeted about...) which is also going well. The BoRG paper is in dire need of being submitted to co-authors.
And my GHOSTS collaboration paper, the NHEMESES data paper, and the Andromeda Project early results also need writing up...

Productive week. Looking forward to going home though (kids have grown SO BIG in my absence). And apparently the weather in the Netherlands is more tropical than it is here...





Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Night Five; the last night.

This is the last night of observing and like a student cramming for an exam...I must watch out not to doublebook. It's too tempting to try to get all the objects in the run observed. I simply did not have the time for that!

Add to this that I have gotten steadily better at prioritizing the targets, and I end up wishing I had a night extra to mop up the last targets. I mentally file all this under "second guessing myself".

That said, the weather could not have cooperated any better. Superb seeing (less than 1 arsec, now it's 0.5...Hubble sees 0.1...). No techical glitches. Really nothing wrong. So excellent moment to wonder if my 30 min on as many targets as practical, supplemented with 15 min on (small but bright) targets is such a good idea. Or if I could have selected the targets better.

Feh. We have what we have. Time to generate that redshift catalog and fold it in with our SDSS master catalog.

Skyped with the Family again. Good to see the M cheerfully waving at Papa. I am nearly done. Now I have to remember how to reduce ISIS data. I have my MsC thesis notes somewhere...


Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Fourth Night

I'm on top of a mountain, on an island in the Atlantic ocean, in a six story building, of which the top three rotate, collecting light millions of years old to look for the signature of what amounts to sigar smoke floating in the hardest of vacuums. It's night four. It must be Wednesday.

Sometimes you have to phrase what you do, so you realize how frakkin' awesome this job really is. I got to go with the telescope operator (there is a different term for this job now but TO seems much better in my view...) and see the opening of the dome. Then I ran back down to the control room to do sky flats.

Observing is going well. The guys at the INT were not so lucky. The power outage has borked their contol computers and now nothing is happening there. I' lucky. Weather is good too. Double lucky.


The WHT telescope with the dome door. This is not a small door.

Opening with an allmighty noise. V. cool.





the INT. At least they managed to get the dome open...


looking up.

The ISIS spectrograph I'm using

Monday, September 2, 2013

Third Night of Observing

Third night on the WHT and we have the routine down. Calibration done and dusted in the afternoon, half hour exposures for 17 targets. A record.

This afternoon skype with the fam went ok. Connection keeps dropping at random points so there is a lot of "calling you back" and mimeing "can't hear you, hanging up".

I tinkered with a script to show the slits on SDSS images with APLPY. So far no joy. Now I *have* managed to plot a line on an image befoe but it eludes me why that trick won't work now. And re-re-re-submitted 2013e. Let's see how that one goes. Also: some writing on SUPERsecret project. ssh!

I'm running out of targets for the beginning of the night and easy targets (low airmass) overall. I may split the sample in those we only need 15 minutes for (just to get redshifts, nothing fancy) and those I will want to get high s/n with a 2 hour total exposure...

I had 7 hours of sleep. But the run down the trail was a little overambitious. Completely bushed now. Time for bed.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Second night observing

It's the second night observing and I am starting to feel it a little. I did manage to sleep some and after that went on the run that I resolved I would do every day (it's not that impressive but helps me wake up). Trick now is to stay awake. 

Yesterday's haul was a good one and this night is going pretty well so far. We tweaked the run scrips some, it turned out the blue arm chip needed to be windowed (faster readout), a result from a script crash last night. So we are on track to doing some 15 targets again tonight. If not more...

One new development: the new night assistant asked for printed finder charts. And with those, I have now determined some of the slit position angles using...a protractor...

I'm getting into odd pairs. For example, this is a little group of three galaxies in the overlapping catalog (here). None have a redshift yet. I did the central one and the top right. Later we'll revisit and include the edge-on too.

And then there is this odd pair (?) of galaxies. Clearly *something* is peaking out above the plane f this galaxy (look here). Maybe another face-on spiral? Maybe something else?

Investigations are ongoing. Meanwhile, I got my S4G morphology paper submitted again. Got some help from a statistician friend over twitter. Everyone should have a statistician friend.

on to the next thing on the todo list.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

First Night

Tonight was the first night of ISIS observations. The clear blue sky at dinner held the promise of good conditions. Seeing at 0.6 arcsec (really good) and relatively smooth operations all round. I had some minor hiccups (oops this chip was left at fast readout, stuff like that) but on the whole good first part of the run. Of the science goals, redshifts should be no issue, spectral classification also in the bad but the attenuation curves are going to be challenging. I keep wondering if/how much I should increase integration times. But as always, it is probably better to parcel time between two object rather than spend it all on one.

This afternoon, I was still frantically obtaining position angles for all my targets. And the Skype call with the family was not very successful thanks to the spotty internet in my room. What it conveyed most was that Marten missed his papa and Charlotte would like to pack up and go to "her house".
Then I accidentally ran late getting to my instrument orientation. Fortunately ING staff know what they are doing. I got all set up and it's going well. Paid the man in stroopwafels of course.

oh and did I mention I ran for a bit? There is a trail that starts near one of the helipads. Let's see if I can do it again later today.

Friday, August 30, 2013

Position Angle

Start of an observing week at the WHT on La Palma. Spent the day talking to the friendly ING staff on the Snowhite project (do all dwarfs have dusty beards?) and the scheduling and configuration of the service observations they will be doing later in the semester for another SoeperSecret project.

Meanwhile, I still need to determine the positon angle of the slit for the observations that are going to start tomorrow night. Slow but steady progress. With some finagling these long-slit observations of occulting pairs of galaxies can hold quite a bit of information in one go. Thanks to the GalaxyZoo, we are certainly not lacking in targets!

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Fire up the Paper Zamboni

The ESA fellowship is coming to a close and it is time I cleared up some almost-finished papers. Thee is a lovely result from GalaxyZoo 2 data (now public so I'd better hurry up), the S4G morphology paper has a second referee rapport (nothing major, just some minor revisions, all take time), the BoRG survey paper on Galaxy M-dwarf is close to be ready and needs to go to the co-authors (some minor revisions...more time & mental cpu), the GHOSTS paper on the stellar structures in the NGC891 halo need a major revision before it goes back to the team, just got the data on background galaxies in the Andromeda Project that is just begging to be turned into a short paper (classic case of me productively procrastinating...the key is "productively" right?)...so much to do!

Observing run in a week and half too. Occulting galaxies. Working title: the SNOWHITE project.
Talk to prepare, target list to finalize.

Guess vacation is over. Better sweep up those papers and get going.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

A Different Problem

In Astronomy, the goal is often to obtain telescope time for a project. Some telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the new ALMA array in Chile, are especially competative as quite literally everyone could use the information from observations with those facilities to further their topic. Some are not quite as over-subscribed but it is still a competition. You really have to make you case well every time.

I quite enjoy writing proposals since it requires enthusiasm, honing my writing skills and the page limit kind of puts a lid on the usual caveats (a halfway-decent scientist always points all the possible flaws and weaknesses in their own method but no space for that in a proposal!).

So I tend to write a fair number of proposals...but I never expect the majority of them to make it. Especially in the case of the most competitive observatories. This round however, I won two separate observing runs on the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma and time on the JCMT telescope in Hawaii! And four (!) of the proposals I was on, made it for Hubble! I haven't even heard from ESO yet...

Now I'll need travel money to get there. A different problem altogether. A luxury one for sure but still a bit of an issue in the time of budget restrictions etc.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

CALIFA and HST data of UGC3995; more IFU data! more occulting galaxy pairs!

Sometimes a projects just rolls. Last fall, the first data-release of the CALIFA project came out. Pinged Bill about it and next thing I know he identified UGC 3995 as an interesting pair.
It is one of the few pairs with existing HST data; there is a WFPC2 from 1994 in Johnson-V.

So I played around with python scripts during my observing run on La Palma. Maps and Figures rolled out smoothly. Text for the paper followed suit. Back & forth with Bill and there it was!

This makes two occulting pairs with HST observations and IFU observations. Single pair papers have gone as far as I can take it now though. Now I need a larger sample. HST observations and more IFU cubes. CALIFA has some. HST proposal is in...

but for now...


accepted!

Friday, May 3, 2013

Integral Field Unit observations of an occulting pair of galaxies

Back in 2009, I published a paper on an occulting galaxy pair that JD (Prof. Dalcanton) found in her ANGST survey. She showed me the jpeg and I was off to the races. Paper came with a moderate amount of stick as the image became a Hubble Heritage picture. And it's still in use as my background, twitter icon and what have you.

Hey! it's *my* image now.

So as part of a follow-up campaign, I asked the ATCA to perform HI line observations (neutral gas) and the Very Large Telescope (no kidding non-astronomers) for Integral Field Unit observations. The cool thing about those is that you get a spectrum for every pixel in your image. Compare two spectra, one in the overlap and one tangentially across from it and you get the extinction curve which tells you something about the composition of fine dust particles in the foreground spiral galaxies. For that particular bit of the foreground disk. Neat. It works. Very well....

Now I need...oh a dozen or more of these kind of observations. The ESO proposal is in of course but the paper on the VIMOS observations is also accepted! Proofing and done!

you can find the pre-print here.

Monday, April 1, 2013

Not out of the ballpak

Sometimes, I am in the middle of (or worse finishing up) a paper and already it's evident that this one is not being hit out of the ballpark. The idea was solid, maybe a bit of a fishing trip, some result came out, but nothing that would blow an audience away (challenge their thinking on a subject).

Still solid science though. I always wonder if I should have sensed this issue earlier and put the project on the backburner. Yet here I am, manuscript looking decent, plots done, in need of one more English polish and also...nothing spectacular.

What to do? Well finish it of course! Hiring by beancounter has never been more popular and the perfect candidate these days includes someone who publishes a lot...

And who knows, it might serve as an example to others.

Plus I think a good characteristic of a scientist is to report all his scientific results, not just the supersexy ones.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

They'll make an spectroscopist out of me yet

ESO deadline last week. As per usual, I had more ideas then I knew what to do with. Four proposals submitted as PI. All spectroscopy. Huh.

Interesting question posed by Adam Muzzin: is it even possible for a TAC to approve at this many proposals from the same person? I think so. None of them are particularly egregious regarding requested time. Still it may go against any group think grain. But I have enough faith in the members of the astronomical community to not succumb to that kind of reasoning.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

end of the VIMOS pipeline

Resubmitted my paper on IFU observations with VIMOS on the VLT today. Finally.

VIMOS pipeline has some...interesting...documentation. I finally figured out what happened to my data. With the final steps in place, the IFU data nicely shows the extinction curves in my distant occulting pair. Earlier this week I submitted another paper IFU, this time already nicely reduced by the CALIFA team. Also with extinction curves. Occulting galaxies still rock.

They'll turn me into a spectroscopist yet. Now I just need a finer-sampling, wider FOV, longer spectral coverage IFU to do the remaining 2000 with...

Thursday, February 7, 2013

HST Porposelating Time

It's time to read the journals,
It's time to write the dope,
Let's go submit proposals
for the Hubble Telescope!
(Bum bum bum!)

It's time grab some graphics
It's time to pitch and hope
It's time to curse the ETC
of the Hubble Telescope

Why do we always come here?
I guess we'll never know
An orbit comes with moolah
and so the words must flow!

And now let's get things started
Why don't you get things started
It's time to get things started
On the most sensational inspirational celebrational Hubbletational

This is what we call the Hubble show!



hat-tip to Charles Danforth for giving the initial idea and first four lines in a Facebook post.







Yes. It is HST proposal writing time again. I am allowing myself only four (!) proposals. Co-authorship slots are infinite of course...

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

oh right new year's resolutions

I'll breeze right by the "At least sub-arcsec." because that joke is getting old. Hm realistic professional goals for 2013. Bottom line: do not be unemployed by the end of it.
The ESA contract runs out in 11 months so by December 1 2013, I better have something else lined up. Working on that.

In related news & resolutions:
1. publish more papers. Yes. Even more. I need to clear the current Hopper and get the NHEMESES survey papers (already growing to be a whopper...) out ASAP.
2. Do not stress about jobs. This seems contradictory but wigging out just takes time & energy which I don't have at the moment. For example: never check the rumors page.
3. Put in HST proposals and win some.
4. Organize Workshop (at ESA).

These seem reasonable and achievable goals. No running the marathon type resolutions but stuff I think I can do.

right. back to it.