Day 10

This morning, after a brief staff meeting, all the interns went down to Akul's lab and learned about the EPR machine. He showed us the different paints that they tested and explained how the machine operated. After we got to our lab, Hannah and I performed another test of a 400 gram sample of sand using the sieve shaker with all the variables held constant from yesterday. Amy came and helped out because her advisor wasn't here yet and he didn't leave any work for her to do. I weighed the sieves and sand samples before and after the sieving while Hannah recorded the measurements. At noon, I went to a seminar by Professor Roger Dube on space weather storms (image below). He talked about CME's (coronal mass ejections) and also mentioned the Carrington event, which was a huge solar storm during 1859. I also learned that it takes 10 years to fully recover from the damage done by a space weather storm. In the afternoon, my lab partner and I took pictures of the sand sample that we sieved with a Canon rebel camera as well as a celestron microscope. We will be using these images for the image analysis part of our research next week. In addition, Chris tried helping us set up a python code for the automated image analysis technique using the wavelet method on our laptops. However, we ran into some technical difficulties while running the setup script. Chris said that he will try to analyze one of our images with the code on his laptop. It's been a great week overall and I'm excited to continue with my research! 
 
Image result for space weather storms 

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