Category Archives: Uncategorized

On December 7th 2022, I cashed in any and all credits I had with the weather gods. It’s a superstitious thing to say, but there’s still a tiny irrational part of my brain that thinks that way. But it was … Continue reading →

If you’re like me, you’ve had the “outreach itch” for a while now, especially when the Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) streaked across the Northern skies. But setting up a telescope and inviting strangers to look through your eyepiece is not an … Continue reading →

As part of our annual summer intern program (now called the Carnegie Astrophysics Summer Student Internship program, or CASSI), we run a python workshop. The purpose of this is to help bring our interns, who have a diverse range of … Continue reading →

Now that the NASA Abstract Data Service (ADS) has changed its API without offering a legacy service, a number of things I deal with broke. While I understand wanting to make progress, one should always strive to break as few … Continue reading →

Just a quick post for those who want to compile Chris Sneden‘s spectral line analysis package MOOG. Chris provides many helpful Makefiles with the code, including a few for Mac computers. The problem is it assumes we’re using the g77 … Continue reading →

Sixteen hours of driving is a lot. That’s how long it took us to drive the 888 miles from Pasadena, CA to Mackay, ID. But that’s what you do to see an event like the 2017 eclipse. Sure, we could … Continue reading →

Here’ s a talk I gave at a recent Type Ia supernova progenitors workshop held at Carnegie. I talk about the rather perplexing properties of interstellar dust as inferred by using type Ia’s a “standard crayons”.  Or is it really … Continue reading →

Reading some online reviews of CMOS and CCD detectors for amateur telescopes, I often came across words to the effect of “basically a glorified web-cam”. It got me to thinking: my old iSight camera (the cylindrical ones we used to … Continue reading →

This summer, I hired an undergraduate student to look into calibrating our CSP supernovae. I wanted to do some more sophisticated models and so we looked into a few MCMC modules for python: pystan, pymc, and emcee. Each has its … Continue reading →

Lots of friends and colleagues have been happily using g77 as their fortran compiler for years. Now, however, you can’t find an up-to-date g77 compiler very easily and we’re all supposed to start using gfortran. Here’s some tips for getting … Continue reading →