Weeks 1 - 2

Week 1

Getting Started With SDO

This first week, my research mentor, Dr. Jiong Qiu, was away for a conference. During this, I spent a lot of time getting familiar with both running IDL on the MSU Solar Physics Server, and using the SolarSoft IDl packages to process pictures of the sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite. This led to a lot of learning about UNIX systems and interacting with unfamiliar coding libraries, but all together was very fun.

It was also great to meet the other REU students. We are almost all in the same dorm hall, so meeting everyone was very easy. We all got together on Saturday to hike up the M, which had a great view up at the top.


Week 2

Starting on Flare Loops

This week, I fully started what my project is going to be on: using SDO images of a solar flare to show how flare loops evolve in time. To do this we first needed to work on a code to trace all the flare loops on top of our image. We adapted a previously made line tracing code to trace lines over a high pass filtered image. This worked a bit too well and now we will need to cut the extra lines we don't want.



On Friday of our second week, we gave a short presentation to the rest of the REU students and mentors.