Week Three in Review

Day 1.  I worked on summaries for a good amount of time. I was able to read three papers and write summaries for two of the papers. End Day 1

Day 2. I wrote the article summary for the paper that I did not write one for yesterday. I then worked on the final two that I was assigned. The summary for the final article was a team effort. After lunch I attempted to figure out what a Schechter luminosity function was. I was able to find an equation. We then learned about chi squared. We then waited for sample to attempt to run a luminosity function. End Day 2

Day 3. I tried to put my histograms on the same graphs. . I then took notes on the on what the Luminosity function. Luminosity functions is the easiest way to measure clusters of galaxies. The Schecter Luminosity function is an approximation to the Luminosity function. I learned that exp stands for the natural log. We then worked on fitting a function to recreate the Luminosity function that was in the powerpoint but we kept getting the following image.

 End Day 3

Day 4. We figure out what was wrong with our graphs from yesterday and figured out what had to be negated to get the proper graphs. I tried to look up what poisson error was. I found that it comes for Poisson distribution and it is expressed by lambda. We worked with the data set were given in order to create error bars for the luminosity function. I took some debugging but we were able to get it to work in the end. End Day 4

Day 5. I attempted to fit error bars for the Luminosity function that I have for the local clusters. I ran into difficulties because I have a loop that runs through the file to check for the cluster name. It kept only showing me the error for the last cluster in the array. With the help of Dr. Bellis we were able to figure it out. We created a dummy axis to send my info from the histograms to and the info from the error bars went to another figure. After lunch, I attempted to label the axes but I kept getting errors. Rose was able to help me find a temporary fix to the problem. Hopefully next week we can find something better than a temporary fix. End Day 5