2011 Meeting Notes

Meeting Notes Thursday, November 17, 2011

Today we discussed 12m calibration steps, OTF mapping, and telescope observation times.
Please fill out the Google Form so we can figure out who will be going to Kitt Peak when: https://docs.google.com/a/email.arizona.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG1BQVBBNlc3c19HcXQxdnk4V1FxbVE6MQ

Meeting Notes Thursday, October 27, 2011

Yancy talked about why we are going to observe N₂H⁺ and ¹²C¹⁸O for the project.
We will likely be meeting next week to discuss more about molecular spectroscopy.

Meeting Notes Thursday, October 13, 2011

We continued filling out the off position coordinates.
For any images that are very dense in CO, or if an image does not exist, or if the CO map is cut off for any reason, download the IRIS 100μm infrared images and find dark regions in there.
Send Kevin all of the FITS images, including the 100μm images (named ecc_#_100um.fits).
All FITS images are at http://uaastroclub.org/pccfits/
We are meeting in two weeks. There will be pizza. We are going to go over why we will be surveying N₂H⁺ and ¹²C¹⁸O .

Meeting Notes Thursday, October 6, 2011

We talked about On-The-Fly mapping and “off” positions to subtract off the sky.
Over the next week you should access our AstroRadio Google Doc and add a few off position coordinates for some of our targets.
Go to the NASA SkyView Query Form and enter in the RA and Dec coordinates of the object (i.e. 01 38 39.21, 65 05 05.90). Don’t forget the minus sign for negative Dec coordinates.
Select CO under the Radio menu.
Set image size to 4 degrees.
Submit request.
Download the FITS image.
Rename the FITS image to ecc_#.fits, substituting the number from column B in the AstroRadio document in for # (i.e. ecc_321.fits).
Open the FITS image in SAOImage DS9 (which can be downloaded here).
Hover over the darker areas of the image and find a good telescope off position preferably closer in to the center of the image. Good off positions can be found when the “Value” field is equal to or very near 0.
Double click on the off position area and a menu will pop up and a green circle will appear over where you just clicked.
Click on the “Radius” menu and check “WCS” and “ArcMin.”
Click on the “Coordinate” menu and check “WCS” and “Sexagesimal.”
Change the “Radius” to 1 arcmin to see the size of our telescope resolution.
Input the RA and Dec coordinates into the Off RA and Off Dec fields in the spreadsheet.
Email the fits files to Kevin so that we can have good reference images while we are at the telescope.
If everyone can do about 5 sources, we should be good to go for off positions at the telescope.
If you have any questions about anything, especially how to work DS9, please email Kevin or Yancy.

Meeting Notes Thursday, September 15, 2011

We determined how much time we need to request on the 12m.
Yancy finished up the proposal, you can download it here.
We are meeting again Thursday, September 29th at 5:05 in N505.
The Planck Cold Cores multiple wavelength maps can be downloaded here.

Meeting Notes Thursday, September 8, 2011

Yancy talked with the Planck Cold Cores (PCC) team and they were very excited about our project.
Yancy’s PowerPoint presentation from our club meeting last week can be downloaded here.
The observing proposal deadline is September 15th at midnight.
To determine how much time we will need for observing (approximately 1 hour per core), we need to narrow down the list of 90 objects from the PCC team based on location and time they would be observable.
Kevin has set up a Google Doc for team members to convert galactic longitude (glon) and galactic latitude (glat) to standard Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec) coordinates. If everyone does approximately 5 conversions, we can pop this out quickly. The website for conversion is at http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/forms/calculator.html. Make sure you set Input System to “Galactic” and Equinox to B1950.0 and Output System to “Equatorial” and Equnox to J2000 coordinates.
Our next meeting is on Thursday, September 15th at 5:10pm in Steward N505.