Professor Chen took his group on a "group outing" to Shimen Reservoir and Yingge, a small town known for its artisan ceramics. Shreay is second from the right.
Shreya Anand (University of Maryland)
Shreya had just completed her second year in University of maryland, College Park when she applied for the GROWTH internship program. She majors in Physics and Astronomy and she dreams of becoming a professor in cosmology. She is equally fascinated by gravitational waves, dark matter/structure evolution, dark energy/expansion of the universe and primordial black holes.
- Internship Start Date 15 June 2016
- Internship End Date 13 August 2016
- Project Investigation of Stellar Clusters
- Mentor Dr. Wen Ping Chen
- National Central University, Taiwan
So far most of my experience working in the 'lab' or office has been getting familiar with programming in IDL and Python.
My preliminary assignment of re-deriving the Planck equation in both wavelength and frequency forms was really cool.
Food has been a challenge here, because as a strict vegetarian, it's hard to find restaurants that don't use animal oil and products in their food.
-- Week 1
I obtained an account with access to LAMOST data release 3, and have run some stellar spectra data sets through a
"smoothing and normalizing" algorithm which I have written in Python. Writing the code for that was challenging, but now it works!
-- Week 2
I have put the normalized spectra for five candidate members for stellar moving groups AB Doradus, TW Hydrae and Beta Pictoris
through the cross-correlation program in IDL, and the resulting velocities from that are in good agreement with the radial velocities
derived by LAMOST for those same stars, which is exciting! I took the tourist bus and visited the Hakka Cultural Park as well as Daxi
-- Week 3
I gave my first presentation during the group meeting on Thursday about an update on my progress on the project
and the issues I was running into with my cross-correlation results (radial velocities) as compared with LAMOST RVs. The presentation turned out well.
-- Week 4
On campus, daily in the morning (sometimes even before 6am) there are groups of older and middle-aged individuals who come to perform their daily exercise.
The organized groups do martial arts with swords, yoga, and dance. One morning when I was there for my own personal dance practice, one of the women of the
dance group (who do traditional Yuansi dance) invited me to join their practice. They (a group of about 20+ women, and one man) did not speak English
for the most part but were extremely kind, and willing to teach me. Ever since that morning I have been joining their practice, and though the
movements are require a lot of focus to get correctly, the dance and music is quite beautiful, and gets me in the right state of mind to begin the
day's work/research. It is unlike any other experience I have had here!
-- Week 5
