Hinode Lab - Deadline, Lab Session(s) info, Practical lab advice

Hello everyone!

Some clarifications and updates for the Hinode lab, I realize this is quite a bit of text, but please take the couple of minutes to read it. At the bottom there are also some tips for actually doing parts of the lab.

Administrative stuff:

1) The deadline for delivery is set for the 30th of November, one week from now. Note also that since we are closing in on the end of the semester and results have to be registered with the faculty, the deadline is strict, so please be sure to deliver on time.

2) As has been said at the lecture and group session, this report will not have to follow the article format of before and is only approved/not approved, and it is sufficient to write a quick "normal" lab report - but with all relevant results still included of course. Answer straight-forward, exercise by exercise, but show that you have carried them all out.

3) There will be a normal Friday session this week. Furthermore, in case people need more help getting done with the lab, I am proposing an extra lab session on Thursday (the 24th) at 14:15. This will only take place if I get at least three respondents to the doodle (link). So be sure to sign up if you'd like this. The session would then be held in the Auditorium (the door straight ahead after going up the first flight of stairs). I would be able to talk a bit more about the point and reasoning for the lab etc at this session.

Practical lab stuff:

1) To calculate the speed of a spicule at the solar limb, you need the spicule's time spent that it moves from one point to another over a few frames, as well as the distance between these points. The needed info is found in the header of your observation-cube produced by mfg_mkcube - see the "restore, 'cah.idl', /verbose" command on pg. 7 of the lab text. To print all info of the header, type "help, hdr, /structure".

So, for the time, you go from nr. of frames to seconds by checking the time-difference between frames in your observations. To print the time of observation of frame i, type "print, hdr[i].date_obs". For the distance you first measure the nr. of pixels the spicule travels, and then go to  arcseconds. You can check the ratio of arcseconds/pixels on the sun  under the keywords xscale and yscale. To print the xscale/yscale for a given frame, type "print, hdr[i].xscale". 

Lastly, the nr. of arcseconds to actual kilometers can be found using the  small-angle formula and the distance between the sun and earth (you can assume one AU). Dividing distance by time, you'll then get the average speed of the spicule!

2) Lastly, here are the compiling notes I sent out earlier by email:

From exercise 6 and onwards, you might run into a couple of compilation
errors for functions that are not compiled in your session. To compile these necessary functions, run the commands from this file,

http://folk.uio.no/ainard/AST2210/Hinode%20Lab/compile_functions.txt

in your live-session.

UPDATE: Do not use the commands for use inside a procedure (with the !Path command etc), only compile the functions in the live session instead, there seems to be some trouble with compatibility issues here, so only run the explicit commands above when lp_put etc are not found.

If you are having trouble with the mfg_mkcube function, run this command in your IDL session:

.compile ~matsc/idl/hinode/mfg_mkcube.pro

or put it in a BATCH file (run with @example_batch_filename), as this command will NOT work in a procedure (.pro) file. Run this before needing to use the function, and it should work.

You've hopefully made it to the end, congratulations! If you skipped here, back to the top wih you!

Cheers,
Ainar