Thesis Proposal Accepted!!

I'm pretty sure that I've just finished my last "exam" to get in to the PhD program. I gave my half hour talk yesterday and the committee liked it. The general feel was that this is pretty new and exciting, but is a big job and I should think carefully about what I'm going to be looking at and what I'll actually acomplish. Basically, I need to focus on what I can really say with the data, since nobody has said anything concrete yet and the models that do the "interpretation" are primitive at best. I've put a few slides from the talk in here. Ok. Done with that, time to go to the beach.


Title Slide - my thesis
Intro to polarized light, parameters I measure, what the instrument looks like, and what a spectrum looks like.
Optical design of the IR instrument - Zemax is a damn useful program because it lets you propagate electromagnetic waves in a completely arbitrary way so that you can specify everything about the materials you're using and model your instrument almost exactly. It's pretty neat. I added my little "package" to the telescope and put up some plots of the "response".