Week 5

Day 1. We worked on creating a webpage for the ALFAFA conference that we have to go to on Wednesday. We had to discuss briefly what we have done so far and what we will be working on in the future.

Day 2. We were told where we have to go to the conference on Wednesday and what time we need to leave by. We have to move our information to another website and edit it futher. After the website is made, we have to practice what we are going to say because we only have five minutes.

Day 3. We have the ALFAFA conference at Union College in Schenectady. Throughout the day there are speakers talking about the research that they are doing. I learned that many ALFAFA galaxies have bluer gas which means that there are young stars. This is often correlated with star formation. I learned that Leo P is a very small galaxy with no other galaxies nearby which makes it an interesting topic to study. Then all of the students discuss their research. We were informed of places that we may need to fix on our graphs. We were also given a suggestion of how to possibly fix the graphs.

Day 4. Rose suggests that we try a new method to fit chi-squared. We were able to log the function and it made our best fit for the Schechter Function even better. I then tried to fit a graph for velocity versus radial distance. The first try looked like the image below.

This is of the Coma cluster. I have since fixed the graph so that there are now just points and not a bunch of random lines.

Day 5. I looked at Amy McCann's poster so that I can begin getting ideas for the poster that I am going to have to make. I then spent the rest of my time trying to figure out the new chi squared fitting method.