Week 3
On Teusday, we had a campus-wide REU lecture on what to do in lab downtime. It was led by biology professors begging their students to take out the trash. While the lesson is important in terms of teaching everyone to be responsible for the collective environment of a lab group, I wish it had been more applicable to me. in many ways, it does not feel like the other professors in traditional lab settings think about those of us that work on a computer to do work.
However, after dinner on the same day, I finally found the local walking trail system. Back home, I go hiking every day that I can. It was a huge relief that I finally found the local trails to go explore. The trail is called the Galligator, named after the old trainline that used to service the area. Apparently, the train had a reputation for being very slow and late. The trail leads to a small hill called Peets Hill. You can walk along the ridge and get a view of the entire valley without having to climb one of the mountains.
The rest of the week was fairly quiet. I was working on completing a literature search of all the previous papers that had investigated the same 20211028 Flare. I found over 10 papers that mentioned the specific flare. These were saved in a bibtex file so that any research published from what I did this summer can do a thorough background. I also read two papers that are listed on the home page in the references section.





Week 4
The Day it SNOWED in June
June 17th was going well. It had been getting cool recently, and I had to keep my windows sealed shut at night (not that there was any insulation due to cheap dorm construction). We had a floor meeting that evening to discuss the dorm rules. Why this occured in the 4th week is beyond me. But, my eyes dift out to the windows as the RAs are droning on about stairwells and fire escapes. Something white is drifting to the ground. Hail? But it was June, and I did not hear the clunking of small ice pellets landing on windows. No, this white thing appears to be ... snow. This is the middle of June. June does not do snow. It just doesn't. We are only a handful of days from the solstice and snow is falling. Bozeman weather is officially weird.
Bipolar weather aside, I still had work to do. Even if I spent the nights wishing they would turn on the heat so that I did not need to wear four layers to bed. I spent this week doing my first loop at flare models. I also spent time runing the code to trace the 171 loops. I did not automate this process at this point yet, and each loop needed to be manually selected. When taking the loop tracing periods, I started at the first instance of loops and continued until 18:00 UT. This long time frame was broken up into five different sections.
Magnetic Models:






Firday and Saturday were great days for exploration. I found a "slide" with Simon and discovered a few new parks in the area.




This friday, we each gave our 4th week update presentation.