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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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...