Head in the clouds

Derek Lamb

Off Season: 2001 MSU Solar Physics REU Student
On Season: Physics and Astronomy major at Drake University.
Hobbies: Flying planes, playing tubas, climbing dorm walls
Best Qualities: My wit, my charm, and my dashing good looks
Best Advice: DON'T PET THE BUFFALO!

Check out pictures of the November 5 2001 aurora.

During the summer of 2001, I enjoyed a research assistant position at Montana State University. I worked in the Solar Physics department under Dr. Richard Canfield. I came to MSU with the intent of working on the HESSI (High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager) spacecraft project. Unfortunately, rocket problems caused launch delays, and a solar spectrographic imager doesn't do much good sitting in an Air Force base hangar in California. Because of this, the majority of my time was spent continuing a statistical study begun by Angela Colman and Dr. Canfield. I studied a certain pre-flare solar phenomena dubbed "Blue-Shift Events", or BSEs. While Colman studied many (16, to be exact) pre-flare solar active regions for a few hours before the flare, my job was to do a more in-depth study of a few of these regions. In the end, I studied two regions for several days prior to the flare, going back five days before a flare that occured on 15 Nov 1991, and two days before a 07 Jan 1992 flare.

The summer wasn't all work, though. Together with the other Solar Physics REU students and the Materials Physics REUs, I was able to see much of the beautiful area that is Montana. Go to the 2001 MSU Physics REU group page to see some of the fun times we had.

On the last day of the program, I gave a 10-minute HTML-based talk about the work I did during the summer. Slides from that talk can be viewed here. If the MPG-movies look too dark to see anything, increase the brightness of your monitor, that seems to help.
I compiled the data from the summer in HTML tables for ease of viewing (also, the spreadsheet program wouldn't do what I told it to do). Tables for both active regions I surveyed can be reached from this page.