ned Allison Snyder REU 2024

Weeks 1 - 2

Week 1

The first week was mostly spent getting used to the new environment. I come from a sea level town (and I do consider 29,000 to be a town, not a city) so the 5,000 ft altitude was an adjustment well into the program. The blue skies were pretty and there is no scorchig heat in Bozeman. On Friday, Mary invited a group of us out on a hike to Triple Tree. My tiny dorm room is already a mess.

The work this week was focused on familiarizing ourselves with the solar physics computer system. Everything runs through an ssh server and learning how to access that took a series of long tutorials as our instructors navigated between teaching the MAC and Windows people. We were introduced to python and IDL, but I would only go on to use IDL this summer. Additionally, Simon and I had our first research meetings with Dr. Jiong Qiu to go over the outlines of our projects. I also got the first look at my flare. I produced some light curves, but they were not very well done.

We had our first professional development on thrusdaay, but I am afraid to say I rememeber nothing but the biologist's hitchhiker's thumb.

On Saturday, the group, bar Mary, hiked the MSU M. I did not realize I was impacted by the altitude until we did this hike. We saw several paragliders jumping off of the mountain and riding the bluff gusts down.

Hike 1 AIA Sample 1 Tree Week 1

M Hike

Week 2

This week, our first goal was to make movies of the flare in all of the AIA wavelengths. We needed to know which bandpasses were saturated and which may not give us results at all. To save time on computing, only every five frames were looked at.

The other task this week was to finish analyzing the light curves with AIA and GOES. I, unfortunately, did not find a satisfactory plot of these until I was finishing my poster.

The last assignment was to use Dr. Qiu's program to identify to footpoints of the post-reconnection flare loops. These collectivly are known as the flare ribbons. They are found by examining the 1600A AIA images.

There were fun things this week too. it wasn't all work. On Thursday, we all learned how to shoot bear spray.



This friday, we each gave a two week update presentation.

This week ended on a great note as this was the weekend that we went to Yellowstone. Thank you to Wataru from the CS department for taking all of us. It was a great time. And I was the one to spot the snake. Not a rattle, but cool. Half of the group walked a meter away from it without noticing.

Bison Blue Pool Canyon Snake Steps