One week down...

...only nine to go before the summer's up! I've been neglecting my posting duties recently, but here's a summary of the past three days:

I TeX'd up a good bit about the simulations, and I think I've got a pretty good grasp on them, aside from the smoothing/softening of gravity.

I've gone over some of the basic LSST information and will start TeXing up a document on that.

I determined that the simulation I was looking at was centered at (0,0,0) but the angular momentum of the disk was not aligned with one of the x, y, or z-axes. I also determined component 1 is the disk, 2 is the halo and 3 is the bulge. The other three I'm not sure about yet.

My next steps are to go over the paper on HB stars again and to start thinking about coordinate transformations so that we can "observe" the sims from the perspective of a planet orbiting a star within the galaxy. First I'll have to rotate the simulation so that the disk is aligned with the x-y plane and the z-axis is the height above (or below) the disk. Yay math!