The Shiny has landed

Fish has donated his iPhone to the good cause (yours truly). I am having a blast. Now I need to find apps and stuff.

Glee.

Research done today was only pimping my XUV disk paper to D. Thilker. Awesome! Now we will go and check his whole 2012 catalog with the morphological parameters. Spiff new collaborations.

White Paper

Started thinking about writing a white paper for a specific mission. How do they get published? Do they count for the h-index? Probably not. How gauche is it to pimp own work?
Some of this might be trivial since it will be mostly based on various friend's work anyway.

So what are the ground rules for white paper? And how much time does one spend on one anyway? First time for everything.

pdf's in latex madness

Every time I plan to "quickly" do something, I end up fighting half a day with some weird error message. This time it was to put H12c on astro-ph (see your listing monday!) and to keep under the 15Mb total file size limit, I had to switch from .eps to pdf for the figures. This should all work but for the longest time it would not even compile. Here is what I found for the MNRAS template using tetex on the mac. It works. I may switch to pdfs as my figure format completely.


\documentclass[useAMS,usenatbib]{mn2e}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{stmaryrd}
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\usepackage[draft]{hyperref}
it is the last two commands that really do it. Suddenly you can use width options in the \includegraphics etc. And we're well under 15Mb for the final figure. Grand. Took all morning.

In other news. Working on my own supersecret PHAT project. Matching postage stamps may be a bit of a challenge.

Stellar Stream

Talked to my fellow RFs about what the hell I do all day in that office. One of them being the stellar stream around a nearby galaxy. Nice result. I could convince them of most of my arguments. Now I will go forth and annoy theoreticians with them.

Also had a moment of linguistic debate over twitter whether or not "a generation of Astronomers" is plural or not. It is not.

Also, submitted H12c to astro-ph in the wee hours. A shade too many figures. harumph. Waiting for the moderators to give it a pass.

PHAT, GHOSTS and the last PhD paper

PHAT
Lots of emails from PHAT people on using their data for cool idea[TM]. Got told to use the public data. hmmkay. And they finally convinced me that the ZOO project on the clusters does not need an artificial galaxy test. I think they suspected I wanted to use the background galaxies as an extinction probe. Not for me anymore thank you.

GHOSTS
commented on a nice GHOSTS paper. Got a little worried about the observational strategy (can't be helped now...) but otherwise it is a solid result.

Every astronomer I know is still working on their "last" PhD paper. No exception here. It was going to be a quick comparison back in 2008... Meanwhile Astronomische Nachrichten has nearly accepted it. Motivating myself to finally put a bolt through the Frankenpaper. Cool to round out the trio of European journals though.

Then it's on to NHEMESES poster making and posting the XUV disk results on astro-ph. I need more hours in the day.

QR codes

The new hip thing on posters at scientific conferences are QR codes on the poster so interested parties can go to the supporting website (or blog!) nice and quickly via their smartphone. I still feel that a mugshot is a better use of poster real estate. That serves the personal-science-ad nature of poster much better right? At SPIE I saw exactly no one use the QR codes.

But I put both on my latest poster. Of course...

Challenge Accepted!

Matt Kenworthy (aka Fish...) has been toying with the idea to blog about research. The rules follow David Hogg's research blog ; post at least 3-5x a week about astronomical research that I'm working on. Fish is doing it. So...Challenge Accepted!

And let's see what we get...