Home Weeks 1-3 Photos

Adventures of Weeks 4-6

These last three weeks, I've been working a lot with Joseph Plowman's various codes. Eventually, I ran out of identifiable loops to attempt to analyze with the first three groups of EIS/AIA images I was provided with. I was able to look through all of the data I'd collected with my programs thus far for each loop and determine which loops were "good" and which were "bad". I quickly found that of all the loops I had tried to analyze, only about five were considered usable data. This was a huge discouragement, but I guess that's just physics research, it takes lots of tries to do much of anything. The reason there were only five good loops was that it's actually very difficult to select loops. This is because many times it is hard to distinguish between overlapping loops since the images are quite dim, so some loop selections might have not been selecting only one loop. There also may have been problems with the stability of some of the loops chosen such as a flare right before or after the image was taken, which are not the types of loops we want to be studying.

Determining if a loop is usable is possible in many ways. First is by looking at the temperature versus loop length plots. According to theory, the temperature of the loop should rise slowly further towards the top of the loop. This theoretical temperature model is shown on each temperature plot, and if the data found from a chosen loop doesn't follow this trend, that's a sign of a bad loop. Also, looking at the plot of density versus length will give an idea if a loop is good or not. If the density is very inconsistent, or the points have extremely large error bars, this means the loop is bad. Ideally, we want to see a fairly uniform density plot with smaller error bars. These two plots gave away the fact that many of the loops chosen were not usable.

After eliminating many loops, I was able to look at the best fit heating parameters for the good loops to make observations about the first half of my data analysis. According to a complicated theory from Piet Martens' 2010 paper, we know that if the heating parameter is zero, the loops are heated uniformly, if it is positive the loops are heated from the top, and if it's negative the loops are heated from the footpoints. From the loops determined thus far, we had seen heating parameters all between -2.5 and -2, which told us that the loops are in fact heated from the footpoints, and that we have fairly consistent heating parameters when looking at good loops.

Now that I had examined all of the collected loops so far, I had to download more EIS and AIA images to use for further analysis. This was the second frustrating part of these three weeks (first being when most of my loops were bad). I had to find EIS images with corresponding Fe XII 195.12 Å intensity map that showed prominent loops that would hopefully be easy to select. Then, I ordered AIA cutouts from a time-frame slightly larger than that the EIS image was taken at, and a field of view slightly larger than the EIS field of view. I had to co-align these images and run a line fitting script on them before I could proceed with the normal analysis I used to select loops. This proved to be very frustrating a process when the codes often didn't work because of various discrepancies in the data I chose. For example, some data didn't have certain wavelengths present that were needed for analysis, and also using level 0 data ended up being incorrect and I had to go back and convert everything to level 1 data. So after almost three weeks and attempting to make six different data sets usable, I finally ended up with two data sets that I can analyze and hopefully find good loops from.

Weekends and outside of work activities in Bozeman have continued to be pretty amazing! Music on Main, which happens every Thursday, has been a fun activity we've done a couple of times. A large portion of Main Street is shut down to vehicle traffic for a few hours while a unique band plays each week. There's lots of food vendors, people dancing, and all around just everyone has a good time! My personal favorite was the first week it happened for the summer because everyone seemed so excited for it to start back up again.

Fourth of July weekend was also pretty eventful for us! We started it out 'Merica style on Thursday the third by going to my first ever rodeo in Livingston, MT. It was a super interesting experience, very "western". Lots of people in cowboy boots (myself included), and very stereotypical rodeo announcers. It was cool to see all of the different events in the rodeo and try to figure out how they were scored. I'm not sure if I would go again in the future, but it was definitely an adventure to have once in my life! Fr Friday and Saturday, our REU group teamed up with some students from the computer science REU and went backpacking around the area. Friday we backpacked up to the "M", and continued up a couple of miles further until we reached a peak with lots of rocks jutting out on the cliff and looking over Bozeman and the surrounding cities. It was a super steep and at times sort of dangerous hike up to where we finally camped. I almost fell backwards because of the steepness on numerous occasions! It was by far the hardest I've ever worked for a Fourth of July in my life! When it got dark, though, it was all worth it because we were up so high that we got to watch fireworks from above all over Bozeman and other cities. We probably witnessed around thirty fireworks displays going off! It was crazy to realize how much higher we were than the fireworks, and that as big as fireworks appear from the ground they're actually very small when compared to everything else around up.

Climbing down from our campsite the next day was surprisingly just as difficult as going up. It was so steep we had to go at a snail's pace to avoid slipping! By the time we reached my car my legs were so sore that while using the clutch my entire calf was shaking! We decided to make night two a little more simple of a hike, so we went to Hyalite where the trails were easier but still yielded an amazing campsite. We camped in the most beautiful place I think I've ever camped in my life! We were right next to reservoir and surrounded all around by gorgeous mountains. Hiking around the area led to a portion of a trail that opened up into a sunlit valley that was equally as beautiful. Such a rewarding area to explore, I would definitely recommend Hyalite to visitors of Bozeman!

Where we camped in Hyalite! Beautiful, right!?