Simulating fields

Today and last Friday, I've been working on my next major task: creating and using a function that simulates random uniform fields. This function basically generates N number of random x and y-coordinates that represent a random distribution of stars. Though it sounds simple, I've spent quite some time and patience on it. Last Friday and early this morning, I had problems just getting data points to show up on my plot -- I kept getting just a dark graph. Found the problem in the fact that I neglected the different between arcmin and degrees. Fixed that in the procedure, but then didn't fix the same thing in the function....but it worked after that! I originally wanted to make my function/procedure as general as possible, so that someone could put in inputs that span a wide range and it would be effective, but for now, it's pretty much set to data points spanning a -.5, .5 range.

After plotting the function, I applied an exponential filter and smoothed the plot. I spent some time tinkering around with the different filter parameters, changing how my filter smooths the data, but didn't end up seeing very dramatic results. Going to look at it with Beth tomorrow morning and hopefully change a few things.

Spent some time finishing up my stellar population - 2/3 of the way done! Going to hopefully finish it by the time I leave work today. Also added a few more sections to my latex document so I don't forget what I've been working on (though this blog makes sure that doesn't happen!).

things to work on:
- finish updating latex document
- keep working on fake field function and improve filter
- finish stellar pop





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update since 1 hour ago:

i might cry:
i realized that all of the combinations with al = 0, i did for bess +2mass instead of sdss, so i deleted all of them and redid them. just finished redoing them all, and realized i used filter 1 instead of filter 4. just deleted all of them. back to having only 1/3 of my stellar population done. something for tomorrow morning!