Home Weeks 4-6 Photos

Adventures of Weeks 1-3

Well, these first few weeks I've been working on learning the various programs I will be using for my project this summer as well as getting to know the area of Bozeman. My main goal is to determine possible heating functions for coronal loops in the corona of the sun. With codes previously written by Joseph Plowman, I have been able to run functions on three predetermined groups of EIS/AIA images. Through these programs I can individually select coronal loops in each image to obtain an estimate for median pressure, maximum temperature, scaling factor and half length of each loop. Using these parameters, a heating parameter is then calculated, and after a while I will hopefully be able to compare these various heating parameters to see if they are similar.

Outside of work, we've all been having a fabulous time getting to know the Bozeman area! We've discovered the farmer's market at Bogert park that happens every Tuesday, which has been a great community event with live music and lots of delicious food. Also in the community, we have explored trivia nights at various bars along Main Street. We're not necessarily the best at any of these places, but at least we're trying out our knowledge!

Of course we've climbed to the "M", which seems to be the classic hike for anyone who visits Bozeman. Although cliche, this hike gave such a beautiful view of Bozeman and the surrounding area! We also just recently hiked the Drinking Horse trail, which is conveniently located right near MSU as well. Probably the most exciting adventure so far, though, has been our trip last weekend to Yellowstone river to go white water rafting. The outdoor recreation department here at MSU has a bunch of activities planned for this summer at a fairly affordable price, so a group of six of us decided to take advantage of this opportunity! Apparently the rapids were very high (I have nothing to compare them to, so any sized rapid would have looked high to me!), and they'll get lower throughout the summer, so it was great that we went near the beginning of the summer! Throughout the rest of the summer we hope to go stand-up paddle boarding and camping with the outdoor rec program in addition to doing much more hiking by ourselves, so it should be a very eventful next six weeks!