Today was a very exciting day!
The morning started off with our first staff meeting since Monday, where we were introduced to a student from Mr. Callens' school who would be shadowing us for the day. Since we had a lecture at 10:00 AM, I did not accomplish much in the Astronomy Lab in before then. The talk was held by Dr. Dube, titled "Space Weather". He focused on the importance and danger of CMU (Coronal Mass Ejections), citing the 1859 Carrington Event as an example of the possible results of another CMU. While no other CMU of similar strength has reached earth in the past 500 years, a quick online research told me there was a CMU that missed earth by nine days in 2012. That CMU could have wiped out the power grid on the entire planet, leaving humans without power for a decade. While an event like 1859 is unlikely to happen, CMU's occur randomly, and are not very predictable. Dr. Dube wants to be able to predict these eruptions in order to give the population time to prepare for a possible Apocalypse; he is aided by the Air Force, NASA, and NOAA. Space Weather can be seen as Aurora Boreali; while they are a beautiful sight, they announce that something bad is happening with earth's magnetic field. Dr. Dube also added that life on Mars would be very difficult, as Mars does not have a magnetic field to lessen the strength of CMUs (CMUs have a magnetic charge, due to their origin in sunspots).
After the talk, I worked on outreach projects (specifically the Star-Cycle powerpoint) as Matt did not have anything for me to code. For lunch, Alexa and I attended the Astronomy meeting, where we listened to NASA's presentation of the new Exoplanet, Kepler 452-b. After listening to that, Matt, Makayla, and Aviriana gave presentations on their work (REU students). Foodwise there were subs and very tasty cookies!
After the meeting, I talked with Matt about what else to code. He suggested improving the interface and making it possible to read in an array of coordinates and have the program account for possible inaccuracies of the entered coordinates. This took me 3 hours to program, adding another 160 lines of code. The program, now at 586 lines the longest I have ever written, is almost ready to run. I never assumed that Astronomy was so heavily dependent on Computer Science. In my entire time spent on the research project, 99% was coding. I did not think this'd be fun for me, but it turns out this project awoke my curiosity as well as my push to get results! Hopefully I can continue working with this program, but I am not yet sure what Matt, Ben, and Joel have planned for me.
The morning started off with our first staff meeting since Monday, where we were introduced to a student from Mr. Callens' school who would be shadowing us for the day. Since we had a lecture at 10:00 AM, I did not accomplish much in the Astronomy Lab in before then. The talk was held by Dr. Dube, titled "Space Weather". He focused on the importance and danger of CMU (Coronal Mass Ejections), citing the 1859 Carrington Event as an example of the possible results of another CMU. While no other CMU of similar strength has reached earth in the past 500 years, a quick online research told me there was a CMU that missed earth by nine days in 2012. That CMU could have wiped out the power grid on the entire planet, leaving humans without power for a decade. While an event like 1859 is unlikely to happen, CMU's occur randomly, and are not very predictable. Dr. Dube wants to be able to predict these eruptions in order to give the population time to prepare for a possible Apocalypse; he is aided by the Air Force, NASA, and NOAA. Space Weather can be seen as Aurora Boreali; while they are a beautiful sight, they announce that something bad is happening with earth's magnetic field. Dr. Dube also added that life on Mars would be very difficult, as Mars does not have a magnetic field to lessen the strength of CMUs (CMUs have a magnetic charge, due to their origin in sunspots).
After the talk, I worked on outreach projects (specifically the Star-Cycle powerpoint) as Matt did not have anything for me to code. For lunch, Alexa and I attended the Astronomy meeting, where we listened to NASA's presentation of the new Exoplanet, Kepler 452-b. After listening to that, Matt, Makayla, and Aviriana gave presentations on their work (REU students). Foodwise there were subs and very tasty cookies!
After the meeting, I talked with Matt about what else to code. He suggested improving the interface and making it possible to read in an array of coordinates and have the program account for possible inaccuracies of the entered coordinates. This took me 3 hours to program, adding another 160 lines of code. The program, now at 586 lines the longest I have ever written, is almost ready to run. I never assumed that Astronomy was so heavily dependent on Computer Science. In my entire time spent on the research project, 99% was coding. I did not think this'd be fun for me, but it turns out this project awoke my curiosity as well as my push to get results! Hopefully I can continue working with this program, but I am not yet sure what Matt, Ben, and Joel have planned for me.