Rakesh Nath, Space Studies master’s student, will defend his thesis as follows.  Please mark your calendars and show your support by attending.

When: Wednesday, July 11^th at 10:30 am

Where: Ryan Hall, Room 111

Title:  Commissioning the H-alpha Filter at the UND Observatory for Continuous Monitoring of the un

The sun is the most obvious astronomical object that has not had effective continuous monitoring.  In the quest to bring better solar physics and solar monitoring programs to UND, we are actively working on setting up an H-alpha solar filter which can be used for continuous monitoring of the sun. The H-alpha wavelength is set up at 656.3nm, and pertains to the region of the sun known as the chromosphere. The H-alpha filter is Fabry-Perot Etalon that observes the sun in a 0.4 A narrow band frequency. Continuous monitoring in this frequency is essential to observe life cycles of specific features such as prominences, filaments etc which have not been mapped for their entire life time before. The goal of this exercise would be to evaluate which such features are observable and what kind of image processing algorithms we could apply to extract effective scientific benefit from the images. The program would be capable of continuously monitoring the sun and uploading images to the observatory website for download using ftp methods. The observatory is actively engaged in modifying two of its telescopes for this goal.

******Those unable to attend in person may view the live webcast via Connect Pro******

http://connect.aero.und.edu/thesisdefense/  (sign in as a guest) or use your Connect-Pro log-in.

or

Public feed (video only):  Public Live Class

The presentation will be posted on the space studies website archive page at http://realmedia.aero.und.edu/real/flash.asp?class=spst/thesisdefense within a few days of the presentation, and will later be added to the student research webpage for theses found at http://www.space.edu/ResearchandFacilities/StudentResearch.aspx.