Changes and Setup (Thu 8/14)

Spent the whole morning doing a run through of everybody's presentations. Got a lot of good feedback, which led to an afternoon of tweaking, and adding animations to help the flow of the story. I also set up the Science Sphere in the Auditorium for the presentation tomorrow.

Yet more PowerPoint (Tue 8/12)

Came in around lunch time today, allowing me to sleep in after our Mees trip. While I was in, Jimmy and I worked on our presentation for the intern presentations on Friday.

Finishing Touches (Wed 8/13)

Put the finishing touches on our draft version of the PowerPoint for tomorrow's run through.

Mees Observatory Visit (Mon 8/11)

Today was the day for our visit to the Mees Observatory down in Bristol. On a personal note, had a sad moment when we went by Bristol Ski Resort, and the whole mountain was green. When we got there, we had a pretty good time waiting for sunset, between the free food and the soccer game we started up. After that, we saw a presentation about the observatory, as well as many astronomical objects. Unfortunately, we picked a rather cloudy night, so we couldn't see much. However, once we got up to the observatory, we were able to observe the crook of the handle of the Big Dipper, which is really six stars. With the power of the Mees telescope, we were able to see three separate stars where only one is visible with the naked eye. Overall, it was a pretty cool experience, and free food and soccer are never bad things.

Undergrad Research Symposium (Fri 8/8)

Spent the day at the Undergrad Research Symposium at the RIT Inn and Conference Center. Spent the morning going around to different sessions. Got to learn about such diverse topics as Augmented Reality for use in Museums, Serious Gaming for Disaster Risk Reduction, and then went to look at the presentations by the REU students. After that, we had our presentation of the Science Sphere Suitcase, which I thought went pretty well. Finally, we went back to CIS to watch Star Wars IV, and had some free pizza.

PowerPoints part 2 (Thu 8/7)

In place of our normal 10:30 meeting, everyone came down to view a test run of Zach and Chase's PowerPoint for the undergrad research symposium. While they had most of it fairly well off, Bethany and Dr. Messenger were able to give us a handful of suggestions which kept us busy for the rest of the day.

PowerPoints (Wed 8/6)

Spent most of the day working on and helping with PowerPoints, both for the Undergrad research symposium, as well as for our own symposium a week from now. I helped Chase and Zach go over their outline for their presentation, as well as begin to create some slides. I also helped Jimmy with our intern slideshow, which is pretty close to completion.

Some New Ideas (Tue 8/5)

This morning, after our normal intern and Insight Lab meetings, we met with Professor Mike Richmond, one of the astronomy professors, to discuss some ideas for lesson plans and other future projects with the Science Sphere. He had some really good ideas, including demonstrating the difference between the rotation of solid celestial objects and gaseous ones, as well as showing eclipses, with a possible link to the way that the Ancient Greeks discovered that the Earth is round. The only problem is, I'm not sure we'll have much time to implement these ideas this summer, especially with the fact that we have to clean out the Insight Lab so that it can be remade into offices for grad students. Either way, it gave me a lot to think about as I took off early to go to the Blue Jays game in Toronto.

Taking Apart and Putting Together (Mon 8/4)

Spent the morning putting some more finishing touches on the offline version of the STN. After lunch, we moved on to packing up Space Adventure, so that the classroom we are in could be painted once we leave, and then used during the upcoming school year. It came down pretty easily, despite some trouble with one of the joints, as well as figuring out the best way to store the screens. After that, we got some pool noodles from Walmart to use for the stand for the Science Sphere. The noodles bend out, allowing the sphere to balance more easily, and actually gives the sphere some give before falling. The one kind of sad note from this is that the noodles now take up almost half of the suitcase. There should still be plenty of room, but it feels strange that among all of the hundreds of dollars of equipment, cheap foam noodles now take up by far the most space.

A Restful Day (Fri 8/1)

Worked a little more on the STN, but spent most of the day resting. Between a stop at Java's with other interns and the weekly volleyball game, I had a pretty relaxing day before heading off to Colleges and Careers for the weekend.

Showing off our Toys (Thu 7/31)

Spent a good part of the morning in meetings again. Started off with the normal intern meeting, which went on into peer review of our presentation outlines. Naturally, that took a while, and we had about a 5 minute turn around before our 10:30 meeting. However, the meetings weren't all bad, as Jimmy and I both won Blog of the Week, and we got free t-shirts. At about 10:25, we found out that our Thursday meeting, which was normally shared with the REU students, would be solely Insight Lab. In that meeting, we showed our remaining projects to Bethany and Bob, including the Space Adventure, Scales of the Universe, the Planeteranium, and Interactive Landscapes. Before lunch, we got in a pretty good game of soccer, with Jimmy and I combining to pack a solid offensive threat.

Presentation Outline

Here is the link to the presentation outline for Jimmy and I at the Insight Lab

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzfN0ZuCWOLtSi1kQjM1NF9DUzQ/edit?usp=sharing

Please feel free to comment

Restarting some older projects (Wed 7/30)

Spent today working on getting some of the other Insight Lab projects up and running. After some trouble with projectors, Zach was able to get both Space Adventure and Scales of the Universe running. Meanwhile, Jimmy and I continued working on the offline version of the STN.

Meetings upon Meetings (Tue 7/29)

After the normal intern meeting to start the day, we went almost directly into our Insight Lab meeting. There, we met the new interim director of the Imaging Science department. From our conversations with him, we learned that the Insight Lab will not be continued this fall, but may be reopened at a later date. Thus, we need to catalog and document all of our projects so that they can be picked up by whoever may continue them, whenever that may happen. Spent the remainder of the day putting some more finishing touches on the SuN, now renamed to the STN, or Sun Time-Lapse Navigator, including downloading and implementing more wavelengths in the offline version.

Lights. Camera. Lunch Break (Mon 7/28)

In the morning, I downloaded some more images, while Jimmy worked on coding the offline version of the SuN. After our run to Cross Roads in the rain, we began working more on the instruction manual and video with Austin and Rajab. We began filming, and got as far as inflating the ball before Rajab decided it was time for him to go to lunch. While that was going on, I found a really cool rubber band crossbow for Abraham to 3D print. If it works, he's taking the first one, and I have dibs on the second one.

Downloading Images (Fri 7/25)

First off, the Lenovo laptop seemed to be running smoothly enough with Windows 8 installed, and we were finally contacted with a registration key for Smoothboard for the Lenovo. Apart from that, we spent most of the day manually downloading images from the SDO for some of the wavelengths with inconsistent time codes. This will be for a different version of the SuN, which will be able to run without a network connection

Different Options (Thu 7/24)

Today's meeting combined with the REU students brought some questions about our code, as well as some possible answers. Bethany suggested that instead of attempting to retrieve and check the images from the server each time the program is run, that we could instead download 100 images from each wavelength, and have them be accessed from the computer itself. This would allow the SuN to be run without a network connection, which is something that not all schools necessarily have. This is something that we have to consider, but the DSE still needs a network connection, which is something that are not able to change. We worked on this, as well as the other bugs we've been trying to squish for the remainder of the day. Also tried a factory reset to Windows 8 with the Lenovo laptop, as it had slowed right back down about a day after we tried the previous factory reset. I had to leave early for a doctor's appointment, so I'll see how well this worked tomorrow.

Thank you Maryam (Wed 7/23)

We brought Maryam in this morning to attempt to help us understand the interaction between our code and the server as the images are retrieved. She told us how the browser communicates with the server, and that there is a simple check in Python, which would lead you to believe that there would be a similar check for a 404 error in JavaScript. We continued working on this, but still couldn't get the code to pick up the 404 error before the images have already been loaded.

Defined Roles (Tue 7/22)

Had our first Insight lab only meeting this morning, as opposed to the combined meetings which were previously combined with the REU students. Those combined meetings will continue happening on Thursday. At that meeting, we defined everybody's jobs moving forward, as almost all of the students in the lab will now be helping us with some parts of the suit case. After the meeting, we continued trying to work through the same bugs we've been dealing with.

Nobody likes CSS (Mon, 7/21)

Spent most of today trying to get the instructions guide to fit onto the sphere when projected. I was trying to help Jimmy with the problem, and Zach was working on it at the same time. It took far too long for such a simple problem, but eventually, they both succeeded at around the same time. I really enjoyed the talk with Matt Montanero at lunch time, it gave me some good insight into college and beyond.