C-CWEL Spring work

Big Picture

There are three things I'd like to accomplish before our visit:

(1) Start thinking about the issues of spatial resolution. I developed a worksheet for this for last year's group, but I need to revisit and revise it to make it better.

(2) We should read in detail and discuss a short list of carefully selected papers. We'll rotate through our short list of papers, and each of you will get one to present to the group. This is modelling a so-called "journal club", a common occurrence in astronomy departments/groups/centers, where the papers are usually selected out of recent astro-ph mailings. The papers that went into this list came out of the lists you assembled while writing the proposal. I then went through and sorted them into bins -- ones you want to read closely for the astronomy and astrophysics background, and/or for the interpretation, and/or for the big picture... ones from which you need to scavenge data, and you need to read enough to understand what it was they did, and what kinds of data they are reporting... ones you might read if you have time ... and ones you can ignore. WE SHOULD START ON THIS AFTER THE RESOLUTION STUFF.

(3) Actually doing the data scavenging out of those papers mentioned above. This can be as simple as going to the journal website and saving the data table as plain text, but in a handful of cases, it is a LOT more complicated. I am working on more explanation to go with this so-called source-matching work. Some of the work here springboards off of the journal articles we will read in detail, and some involves scanning additional articles. I AM STILL WORKING ON DEVELOPING A FRAMEWORK FOR THIS. It's ok if we don't get through this by the time of our visit, but it will slow us down for our visit.