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.

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...

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.

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!

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...

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...).

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.