Sunday, June 19, 2022
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Once again, I made food for the week on Sunday. I used my leftover ingredients from last week to make pasta, as well as a stir fry with meat, tofu, and mixed vegetables to go over rice. I also got a pesto sauce and an eggplant-garlic-red pepper sauce to add to my sandwiches at work. I found a couple of good running routes. My favorite so far is a route that goes pastthe wharf restaurants, under a bridge, and connects to a bike path with lots of forest cover. It’s also possible to run to the Pentagon - look out for photos next week!. I haven’t gone city running in a while and I am equally pleased and surprised that my shins don’t hurt from the pavement yet.
I met up with my high school friend’s college friend, Kate, on Monday. We went to Casta’s Rum Bar near GWU and walked around DC at night. We also visited the spy museum and visited the wharf on Sunday. On Saturday I saw one of my college friends, Emma, for Japanese food and bubble tea. Emma has a Nintendo switch, and I’m thinking of buying one for myself so we can play games together.
On Friday, the interns visited Tonic at Quigley's for tater tots, and then we went to Decades, which is a club where each floor has food and music from that decade. We danced for a couple of hours before walking home! We also saw the NOI-F Orchestra perform on Saturday. My favorite piece was the Funeral March for Queen Mary. I liked it because musically, it felt the most grounded - it was in 4/4, while some other pieces were in odd meter or had an ambiguous tempo. The main theme was simple and very eerie. I jumped every time I heard the bass drum - probably because it was behind the conductor, JoAnn Falletta and I couldn't see it!
For work, I mainly worked with star field imaging software called astrometry.net. Astrometry takes at pictures of the sky, looks for light sources, and matches them to celestial bodies in its database. It tells us where the camera was pointing when the photo was taken. You can upload pictures on the website, or you can download the software (and database) and run it externally, which is what we’ll do for EXCLAIM. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run yet! I’ve been trying to use astrometry through the command line, but my computer can’t find the files where star information is stored. Eric sent me some code from the PIPER mission, which is an older balloon-led mission that featured a lot of similar hardware and software. In particular, it used astrometry in a similar way to us, because it is completely automated and accesses astrometry software through python instead of through a command line interface. I converted the program to python 3 and had to download a LOT of python packages before it would compile. I've spent the whole week troubleshooting this problem. Hopefully next week I can get it to work. I will also need to document the installation/run process, as well a sthe structure of the PIPER code, and present it at the next EXCLAIM collaboration meeting. On a happier note, my work computer finally arrived! I was able to pick it up on Thursday and got it fully set up on Friday at the MLK library, which I visited with Matangi. Up til now I have been working on my personal computer. Eric and I are still waiting on authorization for me to go to GSFC. I hope it will go through in time for me to go to the NASA intern pizza picnic this coming Wednesday.
Tomorrow (Monday), some interns are planning to go to the beach and go bowling. I can't wait to see what the rest of the week will bring!
Note on 6/19: My phone is being very finnicky so I will return to this post tomorrow and add photos from this week. In the meantime, here is a meme:
Nicole Leung