Chromatic

Okay, I totally lied. I'll probably write at least a couple more entries before I leave Chile. This particular entry is dedicated to a flippin' sweet lab that we started today (and nearly finished, surprisingly). If the technical details bore you, feel free to scroll down and stare at the pretty picture.

We were given black-and-white images of NGC 4603 taken with three different color filters: red, green, and blue. (I'm sure that sounds counter-intuitive, but what can I say? Astro is weird.) After debiasing and flattening the images using conventional methods in IRAF, we imported them into a program called kvis, combined them, and played around with histograms until the colors rendered clearly. Then, as is my wont, I imported the combined image into Aperture and played around even more. The final result, as you can see, was quite nice.

If only all research were as simple and straightforward as this lab.

The yellow central bulge contains older, population II stars. The blue spiral arms contain star-forming regions and newer, population I stars. Just in case you were wondering.

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In other news, due to the extremely addictive nature of Project Euler, introduced to me by a certain friend who I know reads this blog (grrrr), I've been getting rather proficient at Perl lately. Maybe this will make up for the fact that I've come this far in my academic career without really mastering any programming languages. (APCS during junior year doesn't count. I programmed Java fishes to eat each other.) Stand by for further updates.