July 9

This week started off with me meeting Dr. Qiu on Monday morning instead of Tuesday since I finished the getting the magnetograms and reconnection rate graphs early. Dr. Qiu explained more about the motivation for my project in more technical detail since the midterm presentations are coming up on Thursday and I need to provide some background to the project. We proceeded to change the time ranges for analyze_rec (the program to obtain magnetograms and reconnection rates) to see the ribbons spreading better in relation to the solar flare (basically get a larger spread in colors relating to each time interval). In the afternoon I worked on my midterm presentation, which I am planning to go over with Dr. Qiu tomorrow during our normal Tuesday morning meeting.

July 10 to 11

I met with Dr. Qiu Tuesday morning and we went over my slides for the midterm presentation for Thursday. She recommended I add some more on how the rhessi hard x-ray images are generated. We also made one contour plot, which I will include in my presentation. I worked on getting all the RHESSI lightcurves for the 15 events. I also practiced presenting my midterm presentation and finished up the slides. Now I am working on the overlay contour plots for the RHESSI images on top of the SDO images.

July 12

The midterm presentations were today! I got all the overlay contour plots for the RHESSI images with the lightcurves also overlayed on the reconnection rate graphs. After the midterm presentations, we had a picnic at Bozeman pond. It was lovely and us solar students skipped rocks on the pond before challenging some other students to a game of volleyball on some gritty sand.

July 13

I finished getting the extra RHESSI images that Dr. Qiu asked me to get, and then I ran the display_rec code again for the two images with the new lightcurves too. It turns out I still need some more EUV images for one of the flares since the beginning time for the 2013-08-11 event was for a later portion of the flare (the true beginning was about 20 minutes earlier). Once Dr. Qiu gets those images I'll re-run the analyze_lilly_rec code for the event as well as getting the new RHESSI light curve. On another note, Dr. Qiu gave me an introduction to the spectral analysis codes. I'm looking at that today and trying to work out at least one event before she leaves for next week.

Weekend:

On Thursday, after playing beach volleyball at the REU midterm picnic, Courtney, Nicole, Michael, Phillip, and I went to music on main! It was fun and really crowded, as usual. On Saturday, Nicole, Jordan, Courtney, and I went to cateye cafe for brunch. Then we bought some cheap pool floaties that were fruit themed and floated on the Hyalite reservoir! It was a bit chilly in the water, but it was definitely a fun summer afternoon activity. On Sunday I had a quiet day. Nicole and I got thai food for lunch at Rice. We went on a walk late that afternoon.