Week 7: Ad Astra

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Wrong… It’s a flying Tanvi??? This week I learned how to do a backflip. It was pretty cool. I am also on the east coast, and I’ve been on a tight schedule. I don’t know how I used to go to school from 8:25 AM to 4 PM every day…

Folks, can you believe we’re already on Week 7 👽 ? Welcome back to my blog! Aside from doing backflips, I worked on creating a poster and presentation, which are still in the works. And as promised from last week, I will tell you guys about the calculations to overlay clouds and get an accurate depiction of my second-favorite planet, Trappist-1e. 

I have been informed that my blogs have been too technical, so I hope this is easier to understand. The program overlays the cloud-saturated image onto the cloud-free image. However, a simple overlay won’t suffice. We need to adjust the opacity (color, in this case) of the cloud layer based on the corresponding humidity levels from the map. Regions/pixels/bins with higher humidity levels receive a higher opacity setting for the cloud layer, indicating denser cloud cover. Conversely, regions with lower humidity have lower opacity, suggesting clearer skies.

A couple of the inaccuracies of the program are related to Trappist-1e’s ocean. It doesn’t resolve for volumetric reflection, which is essentially lower layers of the ocean reflecting and scattering light from the star. It also doesn’t incorporate wave effects and glints that result from wind patterns and the motion of the ocean. These factor into an ocean that is less bright than it should be. But that’s okay! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Goodbye, it was nice knowing you. See you back in the Bay next week!

Tanvi