In honor of my trip to Chile, I'm bringing back the blog posting, hopefully on a regular basis. More to come on the observing experience later. At the moment I have several tasks at hand in my own research that I'm behind on doing:

1. Finishing my talk and paper for the KNAC thing next weekend.
So far I have a draft of the talk power point, though it could use some work. I'm essentially using my Ann Arbor talk as a template, but I took out Alex's contributions since he'll have his own talk at KNAC and I added some background info. I'm (passively) looking for more figures to make the ppt more interesting.

2. Testing out the new supermongo install.
At this very moment I'm running Allframe on the g exposures of chip3. I'm still having some trouble with formatting issues of the output of DAOmatch that I feel like others don't have--it's necessary for me to delete columns before continuing on to DAOmaster. But so far after deleting some columns I'm up and running and Allframe has yet to crash AND it's not making crazy filenames! Having learned better, I'll wait to send the official report until I'm sure that it will finish without breaking.


 If it does work, I'm going to go back and see if I can figure out the discrepancy in outputs. Even if I can't, I already have code to reformat the files to what they should be so I'm going to continue with all of the chips to create a new master list to compare with the other. I'm going to use a different exposure to reference all of the other frames to because I was having problems on some of the chips with the exposure (126) that I chose last time. I think I might go with an r exposure this time, since I don't remember having any difficulties with those. 


3. Tracing back the RA and Dec of my star list to see if the astrometry could be off somewhere which now may be causing problems with calibration.
I've barely started on this but I'm going to focus more attention on it and hopefully have something figured out by the end of tonight.


4. Plot the magnitude offsets as a function of distance from the center of Willman 1 to check for a radial dependence which also could indicate problems with calibration.
I attempted this one but ran into some snags. I think there's definitely a lot more I can do after putting some more thought into it. Again, now that I'm settled in here I'll take some time during some of the longer exposures to do this--right after I've figured out the RA, Dec situation, which I think is more important at the moment.


All of this will definitely get checked off the list this week because it's already the end of September and I need to move on already.