Elliot Cantor: Astronomy/Astrophysics, Week Four

My fourth week was pretty good. I have been meeting up with my extended family in Boston. I will be staying with them for my last week here as the family I’m with now will be leaving on vacation. It’s very funny hearing about relatives you know across the country from some other relatives you know very little.

At the CfA I’ve just been working on my code trying to make a lower resolution version of the data I already have to model different data, so I can get a clear image of what it might look like. I will probably have that completely done within a few hours of writing this blog. Next week is the last week for one of the other interns in my office, so before long I can steal the extra monitor she uses. She is analyzing nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde emission trends in Central America. She says that it is going very well, but she has to finish it within a week, so she is moving quickly. The other person in my office is doing research on the atmospheric deposition of nitrogen and stuff like that.

This is how my work area normally looks. When one of the other people in my office leaves I’ll take her extra monitor so I’ll have three.

One thing that I’m doing in my project in order to extract transmission values from corresponding wavenumbers and convert them into lower resolution is putting certain data points into arrays. But by the end of the entire process I have about 8 different arrays, which gets very confusing. I wrote out a little diagram on some paper that outlines the whole process, but I guess when I wrote the bulk of the program I was thinking clearer, because now when I go back and look at it, I can barely understand what I did. It still works though, so it is all good. One thing that really messed me up at one point was when I was making a line of code in a program that would measure the area of a section of atmosphere, and I would write it in the code like I would write it on paper. Python didn’t really like that format, and it took me about 40 minutes to realize that it just wanted a multiplication symbol in the places where you would just put a number directly next to a parentheses if you wanted to multiply everything inside the parentheses but the number outside of the parentheses.

Nothing very exciting happened during this week outside of the CfA. One thing I thought was pretty crazy was how busy the public transportation system in Boston will be when the rest of the students come back at the end of the summer. It is already very busy at the times I go on it to get to and from the CfA. With all those students as well it must be insanity. The food is still great in Boston in my opinion. There is also a lot of great ice cream places, so I’ve been eating a very large amount of ice cream. The band thing is going well. I find the clarinet Gonzalo loaned me is working very well. The final performance is happening soon as well.

Overall, this week was pretty good. I think I’m finally acquainted to Boston to the extent that I no longer need to have Google Maps open 24/7, so that’s pretty good.

If only that keypad wasn’t there… Imagine the possibilities.