Joe and I moved back from Hawaii to Bennington and I finally met with Hugh. We’ve been meeting semi-regularly the past month or so. He’s been giving me feedback on my proposal for Gemini time as well as helping me sort out the specifics of my tutorial in the Fall. The earliest I’ll be able to start the actually work on my project is probably Field Work Term because I probably won’t have data, or at least a good amount of data, until then. I still want to be doing something with the project in the Fall though. As I’ve said before I want to understand more about the physics of these environments. The current idea for how to go about that is I work with already built radiative transfer code and essentially I’ll play within the parameter space of the program.

I’ll have to some sort of contained project relating to this, it’s not enough to just “learn”. So I think I’ll write a report detailing how changes in the parameters influenced the synthetic observations and why. It will be like a project I did for my Modern Astrophysics class at UMass where we had to change the physics of a stellar equilibrium program and write a report about how that changed the nature of the star being modelled.

My proposal is just about finished. I’m still waiting for approval from Bernadette. I also sent it to Gary and Vladimir. I haven’t heard from Vladimir yet but Gary emailed me back asking what kind of O I filter I want. What kind of bandpass and central wavelength. Until he asked me these questions I didn’t even consider that O I is a doublet. I have no idea if it makes a difference what line we choose to center the filter on. I emailed Bernadette about it but she’s busy with the Gemini Science meeting in SF right now.