Pumpkin Carving

I just got back from one of Josh's friends house. We were having a "Fall Festival" and did everything that you're supposed to do during fall. We drank so many different kinds of pumpkin beer, watched some college football, drank some peach infused vodka, carved some pumpkins and generally had a really good time.
I really love Boston, everything just makes we want to stay here.

Boston University Talk

So I did my KELT talk at BU on Wednesday and it went really well. Not many grad students in the audience, but having a lot of factulty there was good. Everyone seemed to be really engaged and afterwards the organizer said that I did  a really good job.

This was sent from my phone

Presentations

So the KELT team has gone for the shotgun approach to making KELT visible to the Boston astronomers. Today Josh had a talk at MIT, Rob did a talk at CfA and tomorrow I'll be giving a talk at Boston University.

Most of today was spent making the slides for my presentation tomorrow. I also went with Rob to CfA today.

I'll let you know how the presentation goes tomorrow.

Weekend sightseeing !!!

Hey everyone

WOW, what an awesome weekend. Saturday and Sunday was the first time I really had time to explore the city of Boston, and what an amazing city. I spent the entire day just walking up and down the streets and doing the "touristy" things. Some of the highlights include:
- Taking a "self-guided audio tour" of the Boston Gardens and Boston Common.
- Watching a car being blown up into the air during a movie shoot, Ryan Reynolds was around too.
- Seeing the graves of Paul Revere, John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin.
- Checking out Paul Revere's House.
- Seeing the USS Constitution (old sailing ship).
- Taking a "Old Town Boston Trolley" tour.
- Meeting some South Africans.
- Drinking a beer at some old pub with some Welshmen and Irishmen.
- Doing the "Freedom Trail" walk all around Boston and seeing where The American Revolution really started.


I must have walked close to 15 miles on Saturday. I was really enjoying my free time. I loved how "alive" city was. There were so many people out and about.  Monday was "Columbus Day" and Massachusetts that is a public holiday (another thing that is really weird about America is that not all states take the same public holidays off), hence the reason for so many "tourists".

I finally got back to my hotel room at around 11pm after spending more than 14 hours in the city just walking around. I wanted to sleep, but I was too excited for the South Africa vs Australia rugby game, that I managed to watch online (thanks Jane). Let's not go into too much detail on that though :(

After the rugby I managed to watch Sebastian Vettel win the drivers championship in F1.

And that brings us to Sunday.

Slept slightly later than I normally would have (seeing as I only got to bed at 5am). I walked up and down the Charles River mostly on Sunday, seeing people doing all the fun activities that this city has on offer. There are parks next to the river all the way and people were just sitting around enjoying the wonderful weather and just hanging out. I got some really nice pics of the sunset on the Charles and some amazing shots of Boston at night.

I really love Boston. I could see myself living here some day, maybe for a post-doc or something.

Have a good one.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Yesterday we took a walk over to the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to meet with Dave Charbonneau and his students. We gave a little presentation about the KELT project and got some really nice input from them on what we could do to help speed up the "planet finding" thing. Seems like a really good place to be, many really famous names appeared on the doors as I was walking down the corridors.

One of the things that Dave mentioned that we might want to look into is see if we can find all the lightcurves for the known RV planets in our dataset and see what happens when we fold out data on the periods reported by the RV detections. We had a look, and it turns out that there are only 5 objects in the entire list worth looking at. So Rob and I looked at the first one yesterday and the star is almost saturated for us. We will have a look at more today.

We finished off the day yesterday by watching a movie in my room and eating an enormous amount of food. We had some chicken popcorn (small party serving size), 2 pizza's and some doughy delicious dessert. We watched X-Man First Class.

Not a bad night, and a really good day yesterday. Meeting some of the heavyweights in exoplanet science is always good.

Have a good one.

Boston Baby !!

So we left Nashville on Sunday and traveled to Boston. Some delayed flights later (and a single serving friend that had taught English in Namibia), we arrived at the hotel in Boston fairly late. We just got checked in before we headed down to the Japanese restaurant in the hotel for some dinner. It's one of those places where the chef makes the food right in front of you. Very cool.

Yesterday was the first day at the new office, at MIT. Spent a large amount of time just settling in and getting to know everyone. We had a meeting with Joshua Winn, Sarah Seagar and all their students, and just told them a little about KELT and what we hope to get from this project.

Some of the work I did yesterday included looking up some EB's in the ASAS catalog and comparing the KELT lightcurves to the ASAS lightcurves. I emailed the results to Derck Smits to show him the kinds of things we are able to do with KELT. I also let him know that we are finding things that are not in the ASAS catalogs. I also noticed that the Tycho2 catalog V magnitude for KELT objects and NOMAD catalog for the same objects don't agree on the V magnitudes. I'm trying to find out by how much they actually differ and where the difference is coming from.

Dinner last night was at a place called the "Miracle of Sciene" and consisted of a cheeseburger and fries. We got some ice cream from a place just around the corner and headed back to the hotel on foot.

Good first day at MIT

PS. Happy B'day Mom

Dr Pepper's Birthday

Yesterday was Dr Pepper's Birthday. We had some pizza and awesome snacks at his place with a group of his friends. Had a really good time, met some new friends, Franco Scaramuzza and his wife Erica, Julia, and some of the old faces were there too. Hiatt, Dillon, Colby and Christine and Joe (and Rob was there too). Had some really good laughs, mostly when Hiatt was delivering one of his amazing stories. Pizza was awesome, cake was out of this world and "smores" are never a bad idea in the fall :)