Tuesday, June 24, 2014

HST Cycle-22 Results

So after battling insomnia thanks to the Giant Unspecified Anxiety that I am apparently sensitive to from time to time, I got the results for the Cycle 22 HST proposals early. I had put in three as PI and was invited to a bunch more. The results were in. Two successful ones as PI and two as co-I. A bumper crop year!

The halo of M101 is going to be studied in detail with WFC3 adn ACS with the GHOSTS team and 150 occulting galaxy pairs are going to be the target for a SNAP project. V. cool. Especially the last one is a personal validation after several years in second quartile.

The other two (co-I) are z=9-10 galaxy surveys. One over the CANDELS field and one using the BoRG strategy. Very complementary. v. cool. And fits nice with my latest paper on z=9-10 galaxy sizes and my ongoing project to identify cool Milky Way.

So much SCIENCE!

Definitely a win. Bring me all the bagels and muffins in the land.

Friday, June 6, 2014

The kids playhouse lessons of project management

I have spent a few days spread over thelast months trying to build a swanky play house for the kids. The house itself has been met with approval by its customers, indicating i did a decent enough job.

Coupleof things that happened while building:

- small injury. Handeling wood and tools make scrapes etc inevitable.
- delay due to weather.
- goingback to the hardware store for that thing that I forgot.
- a thing that took longer.
- something that the instructional video made look trivial but wasn’t.
- back to the store for two more planks.
- it took longer.
- late stage suggestions for improvements.

Doesn’t this all sound familiar? With theexception of the more trips to the hardware store than originally anticipated, pretty much all of these are artifacts of astronomy projects. Such things pop up with every project. I have done two projects with woodworking around the house and immediately i can tell you there is a HUGE difference in the documentation. Vague instructions demand lots of improvisation and take much longer (playhoise) and detailed cut list makes it go very quick and smooth (work bench).
additional trips are inevitable but with a clear plan can be cut down significantly.

Small injury amd delay are inevitable. Weather will happen.

But it feels like we have to delude ourselves some every time in order to get started. If the first thought for a project would be “definitely going to need some bandaids during this”, we’d never get started. Same in astronomy I wager.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Is there a part-time phd?

In Europe there are no or hardly any part-time PhDs in astronomy. There used to people that would be on the dole until they finished the PhD. Strickter funding and other rules put mostly an end to that.

Of course there is a PhD comic on the topic.

Not so in the USA where not only do the students pay for the classes but it strongly depends on year-to-year funding. So many people do a phd on the side. Next to a full time job.

So how to set that up? The research part of a phd is a lot harder to do part time. It’s deep work. Hard to get back into after distractions. The kind you do while concentrating on a topic for a long time.
I may now have one or two people who will do a phd with me over many years. Does anyone have experience with the part time PhD student? And how to help them over the finish line?

No idea yet.

Students! Here for SCIENCE! And summer.

This year I am the LEAPS program coordinator together with the ruthlessly organized Catherine Walsh. We work well together. Logistically "interesting" problem, getting everyone from everywhere to Leiden and housed and set up etc. I am the local-Dutch-speaker-in-charge-of-yelling-at-people.
Most have arrived now and are getting started (getting bikes for example). Some final details regarding the four outings to be sorted out.

Funny how exhausting and time-consuming this program is. Fun too.

Excuse me while I call a man about a missing toilet seat. Ah science.