Some news

In the end, the thesis will have 6 chapters, an introduction (of course), a chapter about the visual binaries in the Orion Nebula Cluster, then a chapter about variability and statistical indices used to check for variability in stars, one chapter about the variability in the Orion Nebula, another chapter about the Cygnus OB2 association and finally the conclusions.

I’m working on the chapter about the Cygnus OB2 region right now. I have found interesting things there, like proplyds and new infrared clusters. It is going to be a great work I guess. It looks like these proplyds are actually unknown in the region. They were not observed by anybody else so far. That’s great, I think I’ll put them in a separate paper as soon as possible.

Work, as far as the eye can see…

Yes, I know it has been a long time since the last post.

I can explain, I must defend my PhD thesis in August, meaning I have to finish writing it by July. I have tons of work to do and I’m not in the exact mood to do it. But I guess we are not always in the mood to do boring things and writing a thesis is extremely boring and painful.

I’ll say more things about the thesis during this week. For now what I can say is that I have very interesting results about Cygnus OB2. I’d like to have more time to work on it but unfortunately this is not the case.

Oh! by the way, I got a postdoc fellowship here at UFMG, starting September, that’s one good reason to finish the PhD.

Cygnus OB2

OK, ok, I know it’s been a long time since I posted the last post… but recently I’ve been using all my time to read papers about Cygnus OB2.

Also I’m using my free time (the time not used to work) to stay with my girlfriend and love of my live. It’s been a good time.

Some weeks ago I went to the observatory (LNA - Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica - something like Astrophysics National Laboratory). I stayed 3 nights there, together with my girlfriend who is also an astrophysicist. The first night was awesome, it rained! We stayed in bedroom watching movies. The other nights were ok, we observed our targets (NGC2264, PDS078, ESO442-04). LNA is known for its bad and raining weather.

I was also busy with post-doc forms. I don’t know for sure what I wanna do after PhD. I’ll maybe go out of Brazil, but there is nothing formal yet. Pauline (that’s my girlfriend’s name) will spend 5 months in Germany, starting in October… that will be hard for me, but I’m thinking in going to France in the end of the year, for the post-doc. Well, who knows?

But first, I’ve got finish the PhD… more papers to read.

IDL

Lately I’m having problems with one IDLASTRO routine: headfits.pro

I need to read the headers from some FITS files and later use the header information in other routine… but I don’t know why the routine is incapable of opening the file… strange…

Any hint? Anyone? I guess not…

Iraf 2.14 warning

Bugs on Iraf 2.14! If you have it installed on your machine better install it again. I have a very good script to install it on Ubuntu and Suse.

Mosaic

I created the mosaic of my observational fields, observed with the WFCAM, using Starlink and its routines, extremely easy. Unfortunately they so big (around 500Mb) that I cannot out them here or anywhere else… anyway I have to work more on them.

I finally downloaded the nights released for CygOB2 (43 nights), 35Gb of data. When I unpack them the size of each one of the files increases 4 times… yeah … lots of data. Today I wrote some routines to read the fits headers, display the images based on the catalogs, etc.  It was a productive day I would say.

Soon I’ll have light curves … well, I better have them anytime soon…

Starlink and other stuff

So far I have more than 50Gb of data stored in the machine… about time to start thinking in how am I going to work with this stuff.

I decided to install the Starlink package to deal with the WFCAM observations. Starlink is sort of similar to IRAF and MIDAS (I guess). It is a set of routines and programs to deal with astronomical data. The advantage of using Starlink in this case is that the routines to work qith the WFCAM data are ready and they seem to be easy to use. I don’t know if I’m right but it seems to me that IRAF was developed by the North American (and others and is the most used), MIDAS was developed by the ESO guys (the Europeans love it) and STARLINK was developed by the English guys.

Actually there is one reason to me to use Starlink, build the mosaic images with the WFCAM data. All my programs and important stuff is written in IDL.

I also started to think about my thesis, I started to prepare my Latex macro to write it and I decided to write it in english … bad idea? good idea? Wait and see…

Lots of data

Things were calm here until yesterday…

But then tons of data just showed up!!! Now I have lots of Gigabytes to work with…insane.

Let me explain; part of my thesis consists in observations made with the UKIRT (United Kingdom Infrared Telescope) and the WFCAM (Wide Field Camera). UKIRT is based on top of the Maune Kea Vulcano in Hawaii. We are observing M42 and Cygnus OB2, which are star forming regions, in a long run program. I have 101 nights of observations for M42 and more than that for CygOB2, the observations consist of short exposures (usually 5 seconds)  every night (or almost every night).

So it happened that the guys from the pipeline reduction released the data and now I have all the M42 observations and 43 nights for CygOB2. Now I’m downloading the data… so far I got 8.6Gb of catalogs (just the tables with the results from the pipeline) and well until now  13Gb of images … only for CygOB2. I’ll start the M42 download today… I’m happy I have 2 HD with 500Gb each… but I’m worried with so much data!!!

How to rebuild a lab

The first thing I wanna do is to finish the mess we did with our lab. Things are bit more organized because yesterday I came to the lab and moved some garbage from one place to the other.

My first hint is: if you need help from some sort of “department that build things”, be calm. There is no rush with these guys (at least here in Brazil). They will do their job, eventually, with your help and cries for help, haha. So, be calm.

Second hint: there is no other way, undergrad students are obliged to work on vacation. Where else you can find chip workers?  Thus, put your undergrad students to work and pay an icecream for them later.

Third hint: if you have professors that don’t go to the lab but they think that a lab is a synonym to museum (because they keep their pre-cambrian-computers filling the space which people would use to walk)  don’t tell them about any change before the change has happened.  Just move the things that need to be moved (moving things to the trash is an option) and someday they will ask about it, don’t worry because by that time you won’t be a grad student anymore and you’ll be very far from there.

Fourth: there is always some space that can be used as a coffee room.

Visual Binaries in the Orion Nebula Cluster

This work was done while I was at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) in Hawaii, between May 2006 and April 2007. Bo Reipurth was my co-advisor during that time.

The work has been recently published in the Astronomical Journal (reference: AJ, 2007, volume 134, p. 2272) and for details you should refer to the full paper.

I’m going to give an overview of the main results achieved with this work, questions are welcome.

We used in this work 26 images made with the ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) onboard the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) together with a narrow band Halfa+NII filter. The mosaic covers 415 square arcminutes of the ONC (Orin Nebula Cluster) and each exposure took 500 seconds.

The main pourpose of the work was to find new visual binaries, given the exquisite high resolution obtained with the ACS (0.05″ per pixel).

The images were analised and the stars were selected by eye. The separations, position angles, etc, were obtained using routines written in IDL (Iteractive Data Language). In total we catalogued 1051 objects. Using xray, proper motion, photometric variability and halfa emission, we selected a sample of 781 stars that we consider ONC members from which 78 are multiple.