Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Feeling pretty accomplished after today. Yesterday, when Beth mentioned that I would probably have a Dotter function and plot by the end of the day, I was a little intimidated and slightly overwhelmed. But it all worked out! I fixed my read file from yesterday and read in the data from Dotter, converted absolute magnitude into luminosity, and then found the fraction of light contained within the magnitude limit by multiplying the luminosity by # of stars to get total brightness. I'm proud of my calculation, as well as my file and my programming. It feels really good to be able to do this kind of thing. It felt good being able to present something at the group meeting, though next week I'll be able to explain what I'm doing better. Maya had some great images -- so cool to see her creating the diagrams that we've seen in every paper we've read so far. I'm excited to eventually have CMDs created from our own database in the future.


After a great group meeting, I moved onto creating a function and using the interpol command in order to interpolate data for the values that I don't have specific data points for. Slightly disappointed, as I had trouble with my R-input. I ended up just typing in a series of integers that spanned my x-range. I wanted to write a command that wasn't manual so it'd be easier to change later on -- something to fix tomorrow. Also had a few issues with the function part as well. Have to read up on that for tomorrow.


To end the day on a good note, I did my first 2 Dotter isochrones/luminosity functions. 2 down, 106 to go! Tomorrow morning, I hope to have figured out this interpol business and have that function down.

1 comment:

  1. I forgot to say today: Once you have your excellent (first) stellar luminosity function... function debugged and you are feeling zen with function writing... You should turn your M31 distance calculation into a standalone function. There are going to be a lot more M31 satellites discovered in the not-so-distant future and it would be good for you to leave a nice function behind to calculate the distance and another to calculate the uncertainty.

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