Today was a rather short day. Due to the late trip yesterday, we were allowed to come in later than usual. I arrived at the lab at 10:30, meaning I didn't have much time before the usual Wednesday-Talk. I talked with Matt about the Light Curves, and created error-bars to make the curve more accurate. For lunch we had pizza in the CIS Reading Room, after which we listened to Dr. David Messinger's talk on remote sensing. He is the Director of the CIS, but also works on analyzing images of earth, taken by satellites such as LandSat. In the talk, he explained the process of capturing different types of images (Black-White, RGB, Multispectral, and Hyperspectral). He explained how images are stored as cubes, and we can access any wavelength in that cube (RGB images are created by placing the three wavelengths on top of each other). Then he explained how different spectra are used to analyze things in an image. For example, using 8 different colors he was able to distinguish artificial grass from healthy grass, simply by the reflectiion properties of the two materials. Finally, he focused on how the complexity of a pixel is used to analyze large images. For example, an 8 million pixel image can be analyzed by finding the "complex tiles". Complex tiles are special because they have many different colors; a city, for example, is a complex tile in an image. Using the wavelength to create a multidimensional graph for each pixel, a computer knows how complex a tiles color components are. This process makes it easy to identify the interesting regions of such large images. After the talk, I went back to the Outreach program, as Matt's and Ben's research program was at a standstill. I revised my powerpoint on Nebulas and Star Cycles, and started the write-up for that activity.
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