Marking done, papers and Dinosaurs on the go!

Morning to myself today so I managed to finally get all of my marking done. 9 lab books, probably 20 minutes on average per book, not too bad. Apparently it gets easier and quicker as you do more, but getting it under the recommended 2 hours looks difficult! The standard of the lab books was very good, I even had to get someone to come check my marking as I thought I was giving too good marks!

I now have the rest of the weekend to read a few papers I brought home, which I would love to say are very cool and interesting Astro papers, but unfortunately they are just papers on probability, something which I will be doing for at least the first part of my PhD. 

The papers deal with comparing detections of galaxies in two different catalogues of data (such as the images of the sky taken with Herschel[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory] and the images of the sky taken with the Sloan Digital Sky Survery [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloan_Digital_Sky_Survey]). Because they observe the sky in two different wavelengths, or areas of the Electro Magnetic Spectrum, it is difficult to automate matching between the objects in both surveys. That is to say, a computer programme to find the same object in both images. The papers deal with a method of probability to identify the best candidate galaxy in one set of data to link to a galaxy in the other set, based on how close they are and if they have the same/similar brightnesses. Very cool (if you like statistics) but blooming hard to understand. Still, I'm doing this whilst watching Jurassic Park, so it's not too bad....