[Astronomy] Early summer update
A few things have been going on in my working life that I thought I'd quickly comment on before the slightly meatier posts that I've got planned for later in the week.
I've finally finished the first draft of my third academic publication, and handed it to my supervisor at the end of last week. That's a big piece of work done, as it means that if everything goes wrong I already have enough work for my thesis. I'm still, however, planning to go back to my original area of research (tides in exoplanet systems) and try to get a fourth paper pushed out by Easter next year. I've already started looking back at what I did previously to try to figure out where I can improve my method, and I've got some ideas for things to try out. Obviously I'll need to do make some changes to this third paper once my supervisor hands it back to me, but I'm hoping that those won't be too substantial.
On the subject of my thesis, I've actually started writing it! I've had folders ready to hold all of the chapters for a while now, and I even had the LaTex template ready to go. But in the last couple of weeks I've actually copied my first couple of papers into it, and started modifying them to work as part of a larger piece of writing. It's quite scary to see it actually starting to take shape on the page, but also rather satisfying. My plan is take it slowly and steadily, with a couple of chapters drafted by the end of the summer.
Last night saw a rare astronomical event: a transit of Venus. These happen in pairs, and unfortunately this was the second of the current pair. The next transit won't be for just over 100 years! I remember the last transit, which took place whilst I was at school, although I didn't manage to actually see it. Sadly, this time was no different, although it was owing to the weather rather than my own ineptitude. The entirety of the UK was coated in heavy cloud, which meant that we weren't able to see anything. Despite this setback, several of my colleagues decided to stay up all night and go to the beach "just in case". Needless to say they didn't see anything at all except a few seagulls!
There were however some rather lovely pictures taken from Hawaii, and Chile. My favourite view, however, was taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite:
Finally, today was the end of year postgraduate assessment day. The second years were giving talks. Well, except the astronomers, who were up all night as previously mentioned! Myself and the other third years were presenting posters on our work so far. Mine was based on the Rossiter-McLaughlin results that I've been working on, so it wasn't very exciting. But it did include 10 pictures, so at least it looked relatively pretty.
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