Day Three

This morning I continued learning to use IDL until eleven, when team building began. Team building consisted of coffee and doughnuts and watching the NASA launch of Atlantis, which was interesting. Soon after all the interns met up for lunch so we wouldn't look as sad as yesterday when we were all scattered in corners to eat. At about one I went to a meeting with other people working in astrophysics research (Lesson of the Day: leave phone on vibrate! Because my phone was on silent I missed Dr. Jake's text about the meeting and I arrived ten minutes late. Oops...) During the meeting I received my project for the summer. I will be working with data in IDL to create slices-- some kind of visual representation or manipulation of the data I think(?)-- for a paper that Dr. Jake has been working on with others. The paper is focused on the scale of deceleration of jets in FR I galaxies and looks at x ray and polarimetric data. Some of the code that I will need is conveniently already written, although it will need adaptation. To get some more specific background knowledge I spent the afternoon after the meeting rereading the first chapter of Dr. Jake's doctoral thesis, and will read the second chapter as well as the actual paper that my project concerns on Monday.