Week 1 Log
June 1st - June 5th
The REU program at Montana State University started with an orientation, tutorials, and topical discussions to establish a base line agenda for the research projects of the summer.
Each day began with an IDL tutorial session. While IDL is not directly used in my research project, there are certainly foreseeable future benefits in learning a new programming language. The IDL language is common in fields such as solar physics, astronomy, and atmospheric physics.
I met with Dr. Shaw and discussed the possible projects for the summer. The three major projects are as follows: Multi-Wavelength Aurora Detector, Spectro-Polarimeter, and LED Solar Radiometer. The projects we decided that I would focus on are the Spectro-Polarimeter and LED Solar Radiometer.
The Spectro-Polarimeter project uses an ASD FieldSpec Pro Spectroradiometer, a linear polarizer, rotation stage, and an Astro-Physics 600E Servo equatorial mount. The purpose of this instrument is to measure atmospheric polarization over a range of wavelength from 350 nm to 2500 nm. The rotation stage is used to rotate an optic, containing the linear polarizer and a lens, to four different orientations. These orientations are 0 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, and 135 degrees. With the measurements at each of these four orientations, one can calculate the Stokes parameters. These parameters give a quantative description of the polarization of light and facilitate our understanding of atmospheric polarization.
This week also included a discussion on optical topics such as polarization, Jones vectors, and Mueller matrices.
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