Nose to the Grindstone

Maia and Becca have gone to visit family for Independence Week, leaving me behind to get some work done. This looks like it'll be their last trip to the STL area before Christmas, so it's good that the families will get to see Maia. It'll be hard on us, too... neither of us has been farther than an 8-hour drive from home our entire lives, so it's always been possible to run home for a weekend. But Anchorage will be an adventure, we'll make a few trips down per year, and we'll have our share of visitors. We're looking forward to it.

I have about 8-9 days while they're away to work really hard on my thesis research. It's lonely work, but it needs to get done, and honestly it's pretty exciting. As I'm poring over my data, comparing Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data with images I took with the 3.5-meter telescope at APO, I feel like a real astronomer. And there's a hint of light at the end of the tunnel. When Maia and Becca get back, I'll have about a month to get my dissertation to my committee, then about two more weeks to work on my presentation for my defense. So much to do!

I thought I'd share one of my cooler images, taken from the SDSS data. This is Comet Dalcanton, discovered in the Sloan data back in 1999. My code predicts the location of the comet (cross-hairs), then looks for detections that were there in one image but not in the next (circles). See the two extra circles? It's not uncommon to find faint "transients" that have nothing to do with the comet or asteroid in question, but in this case it's possible that they're actually fragments from the comet. I can't prove that yet (in fact, they don't seem to be moving fast enough to keep up with the nucleus), but it's an exciting possibility. Heck, it's cool every time the circles line up with the crosshairs. And that, my friends, is why I'm a scientist.



Back to work!