And the Results are in

Its been a successful few days workwise, the allocations from the Gemini TAC (telescope allocation committee) have come in and all three of my proposals for the coming semester have been awarded time. Adding up to a grand total of 72 hours or around 8-10 nights of 8m time its a big success but also comes with big problems, namely getting all the PhaseII work done in time for the deadline in January. Its going to be a busy Christmas.

The three proposals actually break down into two projects, one is continuing our work of using Globular Clusters around galaxies to determine the formation history and Dark Matter content of the galaxies. I'll probably write a big post about this when I finish the papers I'm working on now.

The other is examining the stellar populations of S0 galaxies, these galaxies are an interesting intermediate galaxy type between star forming Spirals and old dead Elliptical galaxies. By looking at their stellar populations we hope to be able to determine how these galaxies formed, with a view toward determining the possible future of our own Milky Way.