Projects

  • Digital Research Journal

  • August 18, 2020
    Research Journal, HTML, Jekyll,
  • I created a digital research journal in the form of HTML website using Jekyll to better track my progress and results of my research in Cosmic Rays. Using a HTML document, I was able to link and store images from my research, link to outside resources, save important code syntax, and outputs of coding scripts. I created a git repository to track the progress of the journal and creates a record similar to the role of a traditional research journal. I included categories to my daily posts to track my focus and progress on projects within my research. The benefits of this digital research journal greatly outweighs the traditional research journal as a computational physicist.

  • Observation of the GZK suppression with the Telescope Array fluorescence telescopes and deployment of the Telescope Array expansion

  • April 23, 2020
    Telescope Array, Research, Thesis Defense, Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays, TAx4, GZK Suppression, Cosmic Ray Energy Spectrum,
  • My thesis and thesis defense slides for my PhD in Physics at the University of Utah where I conducted research with the Telescope Array Cosmic Ray Observatory on the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Ray energy spectrum. My thesis focused on: refurbishing, testing, deploying, and collecting first light of the new Telescope Array expansion (TAx4) Fluorescence Detectors (FDs); calculating a preliminary cosmic ray energy spectrum with the TAx4 Middle Drum site first year of data; developing a novel machine learning weather classification method for the Telescope Array Fluorescence telescopes; and calculating a ten year cosmic ray energy spectrum using the monocular reconstructed events from the Black Rock and Long Ridge FD sites.

  • PyRoot vs. SciPy Fitting in Python

  • February 08, 2020
    PyRoot, SciPy, Fitting, Python, CERN ROOT,
  • Python example comparing python modules SciPy and PyRoot in fitting a gaussian sampled distribution. SciPy is a popular python module for scientific computing. PyRoot is a python interface to the CERN ROOT C++ program which is a robust data analysis framework used by many in fundamental physics research. However there is not much documentation on how to use PyRoot. This is an example of using PyRoot to fit a distribution in Python and comparing it to SciPy.

  • Telescope Array Composite Satellite Map using Landsat Data

  • February 08, 2020
    GIS, GDAL, rasterio, LandSat 8, AWS, NumPy, Telescope Array, Remote Sensing, Python,
  • Created a composite satellite map of the Telescope Array Cosmic Ray Observatory using data from the LandSat 8. The Telescope Array Cosmic Ray Observatory is located in the Sevier Desert of Millard County, Utah. The Landsat 8 data was pulled from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The red, green, and blue bands were combined into a composite image using NumPy. Site information and points of interest were overlayed on the composite satellite image. The Haversine formula was used to calculate the great-circle distance between sites given their GPS location to place the sites relative on the satellite image.

  • Telescope Array Topographic Maps using Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Data

  • February 08, 2020
    GIS, GDAL, SRTM, rasterio, NumPy, Python, Telescope Array, Remote Sensing,
  • A topographic map and shaded relief map of the Telescope Array (TA) Cosmic Ray Observatory located in the Sevier Desert of Millard County Utah were created using Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data in Python. The SRTM data was loaded into python using python GDAL and the raster window was cropped to TA's location using rasterio. A topographic altitude map and a shaded relief map were created and an informational overlay was added to both.

  • Telescope Array Weather Classification and Other Interesting Pedestal Animations

  • November 10, 2019
    Telescope Array, Research, Machine Learning, Transient Luminous Events,
  • Research project to classify the weather in the Fluorescence Detector's field of view using machine learning. A series of snapshots of the night's progression using the baseline values of each photomultiplier tube and using it's nominal position on the night sky to reconstruct the detector's full field of view. These snapshots were feed into a Recurrent Convolution Neural Network (RCNN) for classification. Other interesting transient luminous events were seen in these snapshots.
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