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Fundamental Workings of the Universe

The study of matter, light, eveything inbetween and beyond.

All natural phenomena are constrained by physical laws. We as humans experience the laws of physics everyday. In both a physical and conceptual sense, gravity weighted heavily on me when I approached the realm of quantum mechanics. Since math is often used to describe the precise nature of physics, I'll try to avoid complex theory and simply describe how I've used it for my research.

Physics

Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara

Astrophysics

I made many of these images from collections of various .FITS files gathered from the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO). After failing quantum mechanics not once, but twice, I transitioned from the common B.S in Physics to a more uncommon B.A. This allowed me to relearn quantum mechanics from a larger point of view. The next semester, I enrolled in an astrophysics class which focused on observational methods and data structures. I was very new to the concept of programming at the time, which was well recieved by the professor. They taught the class Astroart and convinced me to enroll in another class of theirs, optics, which focused on the program dbOptic. The latter introduced me to ray-tracing simulations and lense design. The former resulted in many fun side projects and offered a different perspective on quantum mechanical interactions from a simplified introduction to condensed matter physics.


Astroart

Astroart 9 is a program commonly used for image processing, analysis, astrometry, photometry, camera and telescope control. Using the star atlas map it provides, we set a series of reference stars with known magnitudes. Using astroart, calculations of unknown magnitudes can be used for the stars accross the rest of the image. Using the calculated B-V magnitudes of those stars allows one to calculated the associated temperature for use in light inteisity conversions. These allow the .fits file to be represented as a .tif file, allowing for further post-processing of the images in software like GIMP.
It took many trials but I was finally able to grasp the concept of programming from an extremly unlikely source. Many of the submission materials and requisition forms are formatted in XML, and the programs we used simply helped structure it in a more digustable manner, such as "click and play" programs like Astroart.


Andromeda Galaxy

The class had access to the network of telescopes from the LCO and we were allowed to put in requests to objects in space. This particular final project ended in the tracking of 4-Vesta, one of the largest and most massive asteroids in the asteroid belt. Using photoshop tools like the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), layers representing red, blue, and green (RBG) intensties can be overlaid to produce the expected color of the image if one were to be close enough to the entity to observe it. Once the basic shape of Andromeda was seen in my image, I decided to move on to a closer object.

Wiki for comparison

My Final Project


Orion Nebula

I'm often asked if my name has a relation to anything. As it turns out, I am not named after Orion, but that would be cool! After I completed refining the image of M31, I noticed Orion's Nebula (M42) was one of the most photogenic objects in the visible night sky. I decided to gather recent imagery of it and refine my own version of it.
The slides for the final group project can be seen here. As a three person group, my classmates and I descibed the mathematical and theoretical reseasoning behind how the images were gathered, processed, and analyzed to depict moving objects in space. During my time in these labs, I also started taking physics related courses in Geography. My first class, physics of oceanography, started my pursit of Geography in academia.