Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Students!

Today I've met all my students. There will be 6 Bachelor students this year. yay. I better be super-duper organized. Last year was a blast and everyone graduated after doing quite a bit of fun science.  That was 4 Bachelor students doing 2 projects (one project just re-submitted to MNRAS).

So let's see if I can take it to 150% of last year's success. And I am helping with a single Master's student project.

There are three projects:

XUV disks of galaxies, in what kind of galaxy and environment do they occur?
 - 2MASS enviromental parameters
 - WISE stellar masses and star-formation rates
 -  GZ2 morphologies

Nuclear Star Clusters, What are their host galaxies like?
 - 2MASS enviromental parameters
 - WISE stellar masses and star-formation rates
 - SDSS BPT classifications

the Vermin Galaxy, a galaxy found behind Beta Pic. Map the dust attenuation.





Monday, November 30, 2015

Bachelors Project

The revision of the Bachelor project's results in now resubmitted to MNRAS. The referee was extremely helpful and gave constructive criticism. So nice we got the nice referee for 2015. (if you are the referee for this paper THANK YOU!, so nice to be able to point to something and say "look not everyone is mean"). They also presented their work at an undergraduate research conference here in the Netherlands. No win for them but still!

The paper needed some TLC that me & Matt gave it. It reads pretty well now. Not bad for a postdoc and 2 Bachelors.

My LEAPS student Alejndro is also done with his A&A paper. One more read and it can go off into resubmission. Won't that be nice...

Now I can point to these (and a bunch of other) papers and say "look I can work with students! They don't run away!" In fact I tallied up all the students I've worked with over the years. More than I thought. Also a much more diverse bunch than I would have thought. All good.

If anyone is interested, I will have some 3-4 Bachelor projects up for grabs this year as well...

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Magnitude system

The magnitude system has been with astronomy since the 'nomy'. It is a logical extension of the sensitivity curve of our own eyes and therefore makes some historic (if not logical) sense. Calibration of said magnitude system (the zeropoints) initially made sense to calibrate off a star that was almost always available: Vega. When moving to space observations, most of these considerations were moot so astronomy introduced the AB magnitude system.

And now for my rant...

Astronomers working in stellar physics unconsciously assume everyone works in Vega magnitudes. Everyone else...mostly AB. So when someone uses the word "magnitudes" it really should be prefaced. Or clearly marked in the header of their table. or something. Otherwise tacit assumptions are going to bite someone. In this case: me.

I needed J-band absolute magnitudes for M-dwarf subtypes. A stellar value. I compared those to HST photometry (AB)...and in the near-infrared, AB and Vega don't differ by huge numbers +0.89 if anyone is interested...

Just had a helpful referee point this out but it is so very frustrating. In combination with a library glitch in coordinates, this warrants a Erratum on a paper of mine. So I am going through the whole paper submission process again juuust because Astronomy doesn't set single standards but insists on using different ones and relies on a "everyone knows". gah.





Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Me the Astrotweep

Last week was the third trip in a four-week series. I was the astrotweep and a TON of other stuff happened (Lunar eclipse, the Martian came out, water on Mars etc).  So. Business as usual really.

the astrotweeping by yours truly is compiled here. Some of it is quite flow-of-consciousness. Hope everyone liked it!

see here for the full storify of the week!

Monday, June 22, 2015

Data - Bespoke&Clean or Big&Messy?

I'm reading a book Robin got me about Big Data (in Dutch!). It's very interesting and has plenty of examples in Industry and Government on both the ethical and non-ethical use of all that data. The first thing that stuck out for me was the following premise:

The old way is to get high-precision clean data, the new way is to get LOTS of data with much greater uncertainties. To me that spells out an information-theory issue (I don't know a lot about this so this may be a completely solved issue): is there as much information in a small data-set with small errors as there is in a big data-set with huge errors. I am guessing that the first question will be "how big is big and how small is small". Okay your mileage may vary.

But this brings me to the project my Bachelor students have been doing. They have been doing a very clean sample, small errorbars, nice fit project (hey Bachelor students... can't give them horrible data, that is just mean...)

But I think their project can have a follow-up as a Big Astro Data pathfinder project. Go into the archive, get ALL TEH DATAS and then model with enough slop.

this is taking up mental CPU now. I need to email people and make it their problem...

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Student Return

This is the summer of student science returns. First my LEAPS student, Alejandro, submitted the results of his project to A&A. Nice to finish that paper. Two pairs of Bachelor students are also presenting their results soon. Both did excellent work and I am pretty confident we can turn their results into one or two papers. Much excitement. Another LEAPS student, Guido, published the results of the work he did with Rychard (and me a little) on high-redshift galaxies. It's an exciting result. A z~8.6 candidate galaxy! More z~8 results to come too.

It's fun having students work on your ideas. Good to see that initial work on defining the problem (harder than it looks) pays off in student returns (finished on time, enjoying the project and possibly publishable results). I really enjoy that part of academic work (now go hire me as an assist prof to do this all the time...).



Saturday, April 25, 2015

The Last Deadline

sooo. ESO deadline, ERC proposal deadline, VICI proposal deadline, HST deadline (3 as PI, bunch as co-I), and last Thursday was the ALMA deadline (1 re-submission and 4 as co-I). And the paper that just took way too much mental time was finally accepted and done (no joy there just a gentle lifting of pressure inside my skull which is the same in Academia I'm told).

That was it. I'm done. And you can stick a fork in me. oof.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Final Runs on multiple papers and HST proposals

After the acceptance of the GAMA paper (yay) and now a very favorible ref rapport on my paper on the sizes of z~9 galaxies (much older version here), it is time to work on HST proposals.
I have another paper on supernovae (with Katie Mack...totally riding her fame coattails...). That needs finishing. Ref rapport was good and not unfavorable... last check involved emcee. Like so many things to these days...

Right HST proposals. April 11 deadline. I have two at the moment: a super-high-redshift one with Rychard and one based on the GAMA paper. Of course I have ideas for more. But let's get these two done first.





Sunday, March 22, 2015

GAMA paper accepted.

The GAMA blended spectra paper was accepted last week (ADS and ArXiV). Woo! Onwards to a new HST proposal based on this work. It was surprisingly easy and with AUTOZ becoming an spectroscopic redshifter standard, it'll be even easier to wheedle out blended spectra out of future surveys (MUSE, 4MOST...)

cool. cool. cool. People wrote me nice emails about it too! nice!

2015b is in the bag. I've got referee rapports to reply to and SO MANY drafts to finish...ugh.

Deadlines Week

This is the week of the ESO deadline (3 proposals) and VICI pre-proposal deadline. The VICI is a giant grant and with the current trends basically being "just give the big grants to people who already had grants" attitude, I am not hopeful. Yet I have a great idea (STARSMOG) and I would not mind focusing exclusively on occulting galaxies for a few years. Let's see if anyone agrees. Wouldn't it be cool if they did.

twitter is ever more becoming a weird mix of whimsical (LEGO spaceman) and actually very useful connections with cool people around the globe.

In other news, the house is clean, lot so DIY done and hopefully I am recharged enough for this week. It's going to be a doozy. 

Monday, March 9, 2015

ERC writing with Gollum

More ERC writing. Even if this fails, it's going on astro-ph. I'm tired of people being all weirdly protective of their successful grant proposals. It's not a patent people. Should be public. Public money after all...

Anyway. I say this bravely without a penny in hand. Maybe I'll go full Gollum on it ("precious...") if it succeeds...

Saturday, March 7, 2015

A Null Result

In another project (quick and straightforward, started while visiting Arizona), I got a null result. An interesting null result for sure but no result nonetheless.

How are these published? At all? There is a well-known bias against null results in science. People are simply not interested in something that doesn't show a relation with other qualities. Spearman ranking don't lie...there is no relation.

Well we are going to try to publish anyway!

Dwarfs Galore

This week Jackie Faherty was visiting Leiden and we had a constructive initial chat on how to analyze the brown dwarf bonanza that is the CANDELS fields. Meanwhile my idea to use the 3D-HST data for this purpose was also circulated to that team. Should be ok.

Meanwhile the Bachelor students are making phenomenal progress with MCMC and mapping the Galaxy with these stars. Neat.

Brown Dwarf Bonanza! woo!

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Back to Dwarfs

Now that the paper on z~9-10 galaxy sizes is out of the way again, I will refocus on identifying M-dwarfs in the Milky Way. It's a rich field with only a few other people interested. I find this so very odd but hey.

I was writing my year's report today and I found this nice graphic I made on the numbers of M-dwarfs I found in the BoRG fields. I am working with two wonderful Bachalor's students to work out what the size of the Milky Way is using these starcounts using the EMCEE, the easy-to-use MCMC code. Should be interesting...

The number of Milky Way M-dwarfs, identified using both morphology and color.
One fields stood out with 22 M-dwarfs (star). This is exactly in the middle of the
Sagittarius stream. The implied photometric distances to most of these M-dwarfs
agreed with the distance of the stream at that position. The rediscovery of this
stream in a new population of stars implies EUCLID will have an unimpeded view
of such streams at much higher contrast than optical surveys.
The mean and spread of stars in these fields will also be of use for future JWST
planning to gauge how many reference stars will be available for deep observations.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

another busy week

Both pairs of Bachelor students have sunk their teeth into their respective projects. Matt is going to help with a small tutorial (blind helping the blind apparently) on Emcee with one of the groups.
GAMA paper re-submitted. Should be ok now. Paper with Rychard also nearly done (as it has been for months...). I think I've figured out how to finish the GalaxyZoo paper.
Telecon with GHOSTS collabortion: HST proposals and M101 pipeline reduction. First M101 halo data is in the bag! More STARSMOG data keeps coming in. crazy.


Saturday, January 24, 2015

MINIONS!

This fall I was asked to cooked up some projects for Bachelors student. Easy! I have a ton of different ideas floating around. I pitched a few and they went up.

Lo and behold. I got emails. Two eager kids showed up and they are going to work on galaxy sizes through the ages.

And now I am getting even more emails about these projects. Now we get all the kids that are going "oh yeah I need to pick a project"...

I'm excited to be working with students once again. Especially since these two seem to be good.

Friday, January 23, 2015

What is going on.

job applications, ERC grant proposal, new draft of size papers (yes plural), Rychard's Monster Paper got accepted. Bachelor students started off on their project.

Trying to be more Zen (ohm...) about everything. Energy I don't have no longer spent on frustration/anger. Easy in theory.

When 4 espressos don't work...