Erin Sheldon's Homepage

I've moved to New York in september '05. I am now a postdoc in the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics (CCPP) at NYU. If your intrested in how I'm doing with the move and exploring New York City, you might want to check out my blog Sunlight on My Face

I've just come from the Kavli Institute for Cosmoligical Physics at the University of Chicago, where I worked from Sept. 2002 until Aug. 2005

I study astrophysics, in particular gravitational lensing and cosmology. You can check out this stuff about my research if you're interested, or even better check out my daily research blog

If you want to see a beautiful example of gravitational lensing, just click on the picture to the right

Strong Gravitational Lens Abell 2218

Some images

  • Images from my vacation out west
  • Galaxy Images Here are some cool color pictures I have made from SDSS CCD images.
  • We observed the Coma cluster of galaxies at Kitt Peak National observatory. Here are some photographs I took of the mountain and telescopes.

Links

Computer related stuff

  • The Michigan/Chicago/NYU SDSS IDL (aka SDSSIDL) IDL libraries are hosted at UChicago (of course I'm now at NYU....).

  • Python for astronomers and other scientists: Setting up numerical and scientific python on Mac OSX (OS X) is available at my Numpy for your Mac page at the NYU CCPP Wiki. Linux to come soon.

  • I recently switched to vi from emacs and I'm loving it. This is partly because of the backspace issues on macs and partly because of the fact that I need to write code over the net and emacs in a shell sucks.

  • I use gmail, but for offline reading I use mutt (I hate Mac Mail). The drawback was always the searching: it doesn't work over multiple folders and it is slow to search bodies. Also, gmail has spoiled me in expecting that conversations should be kept together, even in searches. The mairix program has solved these issues for me. Now if I can figure out how to save any address I have sent to and use this in address completion I would never need anything else.

  • Setting up a Linksys wireless router with your apple mac.

  • Here is a way to make sure the backspace always works properly in emacs on all systems (it often does not work as expected on a mac).

  • IDL no longer distributes an alphabetical listing of their routines. You can just do a "find" within This directory to get what you want.

Random Stuff

  • An amazing mpeg movie of earth receding from the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft as it heads for the asteroid Eros.

    Michigan Dissertation Style File: umdsrtn.cls

    Michigan dissertation style files in .tar.gz form: umdsrtn.tar.gz or .zip form: umdsrtn.zip Originally created by Greg Garrett, converted from the book style. Includes an example and can be run through latex to create its own documentation. Lynne Allen and I modified it to have boldfaced chapter entries in table of contents, single spaced footnotes, correctly spaced abstract. Fixed bug in appendix toc entry.
    Last modified: Fri Mar 31 00:05:46 CST 2006