Montana State University Solar REU Program 2010
Dustin Hickey
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Thursday, July 22

I continued to run my program on times that I had looked at before.





















Wednesday, July 21

With my program running succesfully(finally) I started running it on data that I had already created plots for. The percentages are displayed in the upper right hand corner. They are the percentage of the coronal hole regions that overlap with open magnetic field regions. I have calculated the percentage, and color coded them, for each time interval as indicated in the upper left hand corner. These percentages may be a little low for some data sets. This is because I removed the regions outside of -80 to 80 degrees longitude in the magnetic field region in order to ovoid contortion that made it impossible to calculate what I wanted to find. I didn't remove this data from the coronal holes though which leads to a slight error  in the percentages. The error isn't too significant and I know in which direction it skews the data.









Tuesday, July 20

Today I figured out the tirigonmetry and then started to run the program on data to see if it worked successfully. I ran into a few problems. The program will stop running if polyfillv is unable to successfully fill in a region. I had to put in a few fixes for that so it wouldn't get hung up on areas that it can't fill in because there are only a couple of pixels. I also realized that my percentages didn't seem right. The coronal holes weren't changing much but the percentages were dropping at each time step. It took me a while to find what was wrong but it turned out that I hadn't subscripted a variable correctly in a for loop so it wasn't updating that variable. This caused the coronal holes to not be in the correct position and thus giving strange perecentages. This only happened when calculating the percentages and not in the plotting procdure so visually I wasn't seeing it.

Monday, July 19

With everything running succesfully I started to run the program on the data this morning. Unfortunately I had taken into account that pixels near the limb contain more area of the sun then those in the center. Thus I have to disregard the data from this morning and work out some trigonometry to get more accurate results.