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.