Hello, All! I am writing from my temporary home in Boulder, CO. I am employed here at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) for the summer. I'll be here for the next 8 weeks or so.

Boulder is an amazing place, full of quirky people, good food, beautiful mountain views, and awesome Physics labs. I have spent the last two weeks scurrying from place to place, exploring the city, taking lengthy classes in Solar Physics, and getting to know my cool roomies and fellow interns. This week, I started my official employment. I am studying images of the sun in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV). My mentor is attempting to study the total luminance in these images, but she wants to automatically remove the dark space around the sun from the data. The problem is, coronal holes in the solar atmosphere appear as dark patches in the images, making it tricky to just remove all dark pixels from the data. My job is to find a threshold value to identify coronal holes and write a computer program to automatically remove any unwanted data from the image histograms. The biggest problem I face is that the computer programs are all written in IDL, a language which I am not familier with. This week I have been trying to get the hang of coding in IDL; I have had moderate success writing very simple programs.

In my spare time I have been doing a LOT of doodling on scrap paper. Once I have a chance, I will definately take pictures of a bunch of them and make a collage of random sketches. I also want to take more pictures of Boulder and the surrounding area which I will also publish here. Until then, enjoy the random Star Trek doodle I have posted. I hope that you are all doing well!