They'll make a spectroscopist out of me yet

Putting together one of three (at least) proposals for WHT observations on La Palma. Already had some success obtaining Dutch time (going observing in December, woop!) but this time round, I'm aiming for some much more riskier idea that Torsten had and we are now developing.
And it involved that ol familiar: the WHT/ISIS spectrograph. I have not worked with that kind of data since my master's thesis. It looks like this particular instrument and setup will just nicely fit the bill.

Now to convince a casual onlooker that I know a thing or two about spectra and AGNs.

Memory Leak

I suspect something has been updated in my python installation (possibly by yours truly) but a pice of code I've been relying on has started memory leaking like I have HD to spare.
Optemizing this python code had been on my "well someday" list anyway so here goes. Python code is nearly never optimized. If you wanted it to run superfast, you don't code in python. You code in python because it takes an afternoon of your time. If the runtime is then till the next day, who cares?

It better run a little more efficient. I need to run a local Galaxy Catalog through it. Time to optimize this puppy.

Saggitarius Again

For a while I had been struggling with a strange overdensity of M-dwarfs in the BoRG survey. It felt as a strange coincidence or a fault in the identification process. Thanks to Bob Benjamin, I finally got a positive ID on what could be causing the overdensity: the Saggitarius stream. Even the distances of the bulk of M-dwarfs in that particular field fit nicely with the typical distance to Saggitarius dwarf: 20-25 kpc.

To me this revealed a big gap in our knowledge of the Milky Way. Suppose you are a extragalactic astronomer and find some odd over-density of point sources. Before you write the paper on some z~8 cluster, you need to check there is no stellar stream surrounding the MW of any kind in the vicinity. But a decent map collating all the known streams, arms, satellites and globular clusters and their tidal features etc does not exist yet. My solution: email Bob but there has to be a better one.

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.