Web Training at NUIG – final part

Today we took the last course in Web Training at NUIG organised as previously by Staff Training Office and IT Department here at NUIG. This time we managed to create a “final product” sites from the ground and manage further maintenance of them by using well-known RSS Feeds. We also tied our hand on some PHP basics and managed to advance our knowledge to the point that we would be able fully grasp all the possibilities that our local CMS can provide for the Web Editing.

Two Meetings in Galway

January 2008 is going to be quite exciting in Galway since there are two quite relevant meetings happening here.

High Temperature Astrochemistry

A meeting of the Astrophysical Chemistry Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Royal Astronomical Society will be hosted by the Centre for Astronomy, National University of Ireland Galway, Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th January, 2008 Further information is available from the meeting website at: http://www.astrochemistry.org.uk/galway_meeting.htm

The 5th JETSET school on ‘High performance computing in Astrophysics

The School will address the methods used to simulate astrophysical jets and to derive useful information from large datasets, focusing on techniques involving high performance computing.
Further information is available from the school website at: http://www.dias.ie/jetsetschool/

I’m going to participate in both of them since they address some of the issues of my current project here in Galway. The other important aspect of these meeting is that they both are going to be hosted by Centre for Astronomy at NUIG!

JCMT ACSIS Data

I’ve been trying to make presentable cubes for our observations of Wu Core done at JCMT with ACSIS. So far I’ve managed to produce nice, smooth cubes of data from HCN (3-2), HCO+(3-2) and C17O data (all the current dataset).

Please note that these steps are presented for an example and need not to be fully followed. Almost all of the parameters in each step are quite subjective and are done to satisfy my taste.

There is more extensive document located here: http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/JCMT/spectral_line/data_reduction/acsisdr/ 

Here is the sequence to produce the final cubes using STARLINK packages SMURF, KAPPA:

Earthquake in Chile

The news that the northern Chile was hit by an earthquake (14th of November 2007) was quite worrisome to me since we as a nation (Armenians) suffered from a devastating quake in 1988 and I could only hope that the damages are not so extensive. But it was quite a relief to learn that things were not that dramatic at all, in fact they made a good recovery.The second reason that I was quite worried was the simple fact that the town of Antofagasta where the quake felt quite strong is near to the one of the most modern astronomical facilities in the world – European Southern Observatory’sVLT(i) facility. This site holds one of the most important instruments build recently – ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).

Web Training at NUIG

Today I took the course on Web Training organised by our Staff Training Office and the IT department in order to make NUIG staff aware of the new Content Management System (CMS) on the place. The course was specially designed to teach all the potential web-editors of the departments and centres how to manage our content online by using one system-independent interface.

The course started from introduction on basic usability of the system followed by practical examples of web-page management using the NUIG based CMS. I got some useful tips on some aspects of the system that I was not aware of and in the end got chance to speak with the author of the CMS. I’m very much looking forward to participate in the final course next month. Till then happy web editing!

Braid Poster

Recently I’ve prepared a poster about our favorite object – Braid Nebula and it’s surroundings which was presented at the JENAM 2007 meeting held in Armenia from 20-25 August 2007. The snapshot of the poster can be viewed here and in due course I’ll put the pdf version somewhere around for an easy access. I’m still building my site and very soon I’ll post more on a science side of this contribution, but for now I just want to spread the word on how the poster was composed.

Whole process of preparation was done using Apple Pages in contrary to my previous posters which were made using Microsoft PowerPoint. The Mac software seamed to me much easier to handle and gave me a lot of flexibility in making fields and changing the overall shape. After finishing the work I’ve exported it into PDF of 13MB, but when I’ve created a TIFF version of the very same poster it became 320MB!

OK, I don’t wont to pretend that this was my own genuine idea to use Apple Pages to make a poster. I did some googleing and found a post at the Mac Singularity where the author convinced me pretty well to make a poster the Mac-way and I’m really grateful for that and would not go back again.

Elba School participation

Recently I’ve participated in the Summer School “2nd European School on Jets from Young Stars: High Angular Resolution Observations” held in beautiful island of Elba (Italy) from 3rd till 10th of September. The lectures were very useful and enlightening especially lecture by Patrick Hartigan on “Line Diagnostics (Imaging and Spectral): Deriving Information on the Gas Physics and Kinematics” and many others which I’ll mention in my subsequent retrospective posts about the School (If I manage to do that).

Overall the School was organised nice and I enjoyed my stay in that resort destination. There was one minor inconvenience – limited Internet access, which was probably good idea after all to stimulate thinking and scientific networking among the people working on Jet studies.

VLTI School Notes (republished)

After major reorganisation of my home page I managed to delete many unwanted posts but there are the ones which might prove to be useful not only for me but for some others.

With this post I republish my notes from the “Observation and Data Reduction with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer” held in Goutelas Castle, France in 4th of June 2006. I’ve participated on that school with a great pleasure (not only for French wine and cheese).

DAY 1

I’m already at the VLTI School as it was planned, and everything seams to be quite smooth. The organising of the School is quite nice and I do get that feeling of being a student, learning from scratch. Yesterday we traveled quite a long distance and finally in the evening reached to Goutelas. Place is pleasant with a nice nature view.

Lectures during this morning were especially interesting and I learned quite a bit of theory behind the Interferometric concepts. I started to realise that all that experiments back in University Physics lab where actually on purpose and today I could rise my hand and say I also did that experiment during my studies.

My Name (republished)

If you are interested to know what does my name mean then here we go:

TIGRAN: ‘Shooting an arrow’; name of two Ashkenian kings of Armenia
Source: Zoroastrian Names

Historically it was the name of two Armenian kings from which the one was “Tigran the Great”:

TIGRAN THE GREAT. In 95 BC, Tigran II (140-55 BC), also known as Tigran(es) the Great, ascended to the throne of Armenia and ruled till 55BC.

Tigranes also spelled TIGRAN, OR DIKRAN, king of Armenia from 95 to 55 BC, under whom the country became for a short time the strongest state in the Roman East.

Tigranes was the son or brother of Artavasdes I and a member of the dynasty founded in the early 2nd century by Artaxias. He was given as a hostage to the Parthian king Mithradates II, but later he purchased his freedom by ceding 70 valleys bordering on Media, in northwestern Iran.

Hello world post!

As usual, there should be a “HELLO WORLD” on each blog … here is mine. Like it or not I’m here to stay and for long. This is a nice way to introduce myself to the world, but I wonder who really reads this posts since there are so many blogs in the net. Furthermore why would some people read posts by other people besides the people who are “forced” to read, like friends, relatives, etc.? So, here is unanswered question:

Why would some stranger care to visit my blog or site? Why would some people bother to read my rumblings? Should I try to “buy” one’s attention with some “relevant” information?