My hope is to keep a web log of my experiences in this REU this summer, so my parents can keep up if I forget to text them. I'm doing explosive events research directly under Jake Parker (who is advised by Dr. Charles Kankelborg). I'll add some images of my experiences as they happen.
From May 30 to June 2, I learned how to use IDL. I used the problems from the Euler Project to (badly) figure out the syntax and built-ins of the language. It was all highly unsophisticated but now I can read some of the code and (mostly) understand it.
On the weekend (Saturday) we visited Yellowstone and saw a bunch of amazing natural phenomena. Here are some images from our trip!
Jake returned from a conference/meeting on 6/5 so we finally met! I began the actual project. I am selecting the data we need from IRIS images so we can do some analysis later. I broke the code almost every day, but by Thursday there was only one more image that needs to be processed. I've been trying a lot of different strategies to make it work, but the image is too big and the ssh port times out before anything can be analyzed. Hopefully we can fix it!
We also began our solar lecture series this week. I don't remember enough thermodynamics details to be useful but I'm following what's happening. There are some other weekly meetings that the students are expected to attend that start this week. I'm hoping that by the time they start I will have some useful input rather than just showing off the boxes that I selected.
Friday update! I have not met the PI of this project yet. I managed to fix several problems with the last data image, which fixed some other problems I was having as well. I've started in on making some of the meaty code for parts of the project. It is thunderstorming, so the hike we had scheduled for tomorrow is cancelled :-( The plan is to go instead to the Museum of the Rockies, which hopefully will be interesting. There is also an art walk downtown tonight and if I'm brave I will go weather the literal storm to see some cool art and drink wine.
Post-weekend: I did go to the art walk and I went to the Museum of the Rockies. Both worthwhile!
Monday: This week I am starting to write the statistics plot functions. Making the built-in functions work for me is really hard - documentation is mediocre and troubleshooting forums are basically nonexistant. I'm currently trying to make simple bar plots/histograms with error bars, but there is so much I don't know yet. I'm going to try to make these functions work for me, but I could also probably write my own plotting function if I get too frustrated.
Wednesday: It's been raining a lot, but today it was sunny. In accordance with the weather, my work also cleared up a bit. I fixed some parts of my code that were previously not working (but also created some new problems). I'm feeling good aout this project overall. I have enough independence to solve most of my problems but I can still rely on people with more knowledge than me to help.
I'm going to Shakespeare in the Park later and I'm pretty excited about it. It'll be nice to spend some time outside before having to be in meetings all day tomorrow.
Weekend update: I went hiking again yesterday, Saturday. It was really fun! Here is a post about our trip! Me and a few friends have also been making a habit out of going to brunch on Sunday. We went again today at a place called the Nova Cafe, which has been a nice spot to eat. I like it a lot.
We are really getting into the swing of things now. My programs are fleshed out and fully functional and I've fixed a bunch of the problems I had last week. I'm still trying to figure out how all of the plots I'm making are going to help, but I have a meeting with Jake today so hopefully I'll get some clarity.
On Tuesday I went to the farmer's market again! I've been eating at a different vendor each week. This week I had carne asada tacos but I've also had lamb gyros and chicken soba stir fry. Next week I'm going to try to go for a bison burger if the stand isn't too busy. (On Monday I cooked chipotle mac and cheese and that was also amazing.)
I talked about going on a hike this afternoon (Thursday) with some of the other people in our group (Darci, Jessica, Julia, and Kaitlin). I'm not sure where/if we are going but I am pretty excited. Jessica went on a hike on Monday and there were a bunch of regular goats being herded across the trail - hundreds of them. I saw pictures, it was amazing.
Weekend update: On Friday I went out to dinner and had a bison burger and a local hard cider. Bison is amazing. As for the rest of the weekend, I spent a lot of time on my own. On Saturday I read all of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman and spent a lot of time outside. This morning, Sunday, I went to church, took myself to brunch at a cat-themed cafe, and walked around downtown for a while. I'm looking forward to the week ahead because I get to work with some actual image data!
This week I learned how to manipulate the spectral data for 1394 and 1403 angstroms. I spent most of the week writing a code that would automatically iterate through all of our observations and plot chi squared over the course of the whole observation. Later I will generalize this so I can calculate chi squared for all of the explosive events from the observations as well.
I also went to a rodeo on Sunday! It was in Livingston, a 20 minute drive from Bozeman. The rodeo was cool, but I don't think I would ever do any of the stuff I watched happen - I'm sure there were several concussions sustained. People came from all over the U.S. to compete.
This week I generalized last week's code to iterate over the 600-some explosive events I selected in the second week of this REU. I had it finished by Thursday morning. I also managed to watch some movies that Jake made of the observations to decide which data we needed to toss - it turned out we needed to toss most of the off-limb observations.
We also had a presentation on Friday, which I think I did pretty well on. I think I finally have a solid understanding of what an explosive event is and why we are studying them. Some of my colleagues said I was easy to understand, which was exactly my goal - why give a presentation that your peers cannot understand?
Despite all of the work that got done, I had Monday and Tuesday off as an Independence Day holiday. On Monday, I went to Hyalite Canyon (a state park, I think) with Will and Jessica, both in my REU program. Here is a post about that trip! At around midnight that night, we returned to Hyalite to look at the stars over the reservoir. Then, on Tuesday, most of our REU had a big Fourth of July potluck together. Will made some awesome curry and fried rice; I made black bean burgers that took a long time to make (so only a couple people ended up eating them). Later, I went and saw a community band that one of my REU friends is playing in at the Farmer's Market, and then saw a professional orchestra and a fireworks show at dusk at the Bozeman fairgrounds. All in all, it was a really nice extended holiday.
I also did some adventuring this weekend around Bozeman - we hiked the College M, a popular mountain trail on the outskirts of the city, on Sunday. Here is a post about that hike!
This week I am going to work on some of the meatier questions surrounding explosive events, now that a lot of the preliminary distribution and spectral questions are out of the way. I'll probably have to wait a little bit to find out what that is, but I'm excited to start something new.
Allison Bartz, (c)2017