Eleventh Day


Today, Peter came back. In the morning, we worked on testing the camera pixels to see what pixels measure vertical, horizontal, 45 degree, and -45 degree polarized light. We had to use a polarizer, but before we used it, we had to figure out its orientation of by using a wollaston prism, which splits unpolarized light into horizontal and vertical polarized light. Lee helped us figure out how to use the prism and the polarizer, and we found that at 0 degrees, the polarizer created vertically polarized light. We then took pictures using the CCD camera of a white background inside the polarizer at different polarization states (0 degrees (vertically polarized), 45 degrees, 90 degrees (horizontally polarized), and 135 degrees (-45 degrees)), and analyzed which pixels allowed light through. If a pixel shows up white, that means that the pixel measures light at the polarization state of the polarizer. For example, when the polarizer was set for 90 degrees, the pixel that appeared white measured horizontally polarized light (90 degrees) as only horizontally polarized light made it through the polarizer onto the background, while the pixel that appeared darkest would measure vertically polarized light as no vertically polarized light went through the polarizer.

During lunch, we went up to the reading room and hung out with Emily and Paige. After lunch, Peter and I tried to use MATLAB to read the data from one of our pictures, but we had trouble figuring out how to get our picture file into MATLAB. The file was a FIT file, so it had to be opened in MATLAB in a particular way. Lee then helped us figure out how to get the file in, but we had trouble figuring out how to analyze it, which we will do tomorrow.

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