Day 16

Today we didn't need to come into work until a bit later because of the field trip, but I still came in fairly early and went to a PhD defense, which I found incredibly interesting. The candidate defended his thesis on the General Relativistic Hydrodynamics of Merging Binary Black Holes, in which he was analyzing and simulating the inspiral phase of a pair of black holes in the process of merging. After the defense, I headed back to the lab and worked on calibrating our beam of light with a different camera. The camera has larger pixels, but because of this, the pixels have much greater well depths, giving us images with much larger dynamic range. This can help us determine the spot size with a rough resolution, but greater precision in the way it shows contrast (it's harder to saturate these pixels because of the greater well depth).

After lunch I took a series of pictures of the spot of light, varying the exposure time with each image. I covered a range from 700 microseconds to 10 million microseconds (10 seconds) on a generally logarithmic scale. With these images I began creating a code to map Point-Spread Functions (PSFs) of the data; first importing the directory and cropping all the images to a 101x101 pixel area (the original images were 1024x1360 pixels and the spots of light are 20 pixels in diameter at their largest), then subtracting the rough value of the dark current for each pixel to minimize the noise.

We all went to dinner together before heading out to the C.E.K. Mees Observatory on a bus. Upon arrival, Henry (who also works at the observatory as a tour guide) told us about the history of the observatory, the recent news in astronomy, and the Astronomy Club of Rochester, while we waited for it to get dark. Just before nightfall, we headed up to the observatory, and while it was too cloudy to actually observe anything, we did get to see the telescope, which was amazing, and we got to learn all about how it operates and the different aspects of using it for observation. It was so cool to see how a telescope from the 60's is still working so well.