I can also provide opportunities for students seeking to develop instrumentation, computational, and theoretical skills. Many of these programs involve coordinated multiwavelength observations using many facilities. Others involve establishing a network of similar instruments on telescopes scattered in longitude in order to secure continuous observations from the ground for several days. Students will have an opportunity to participate in these international, multiwavelength, and multifacility programs. Major international campaigns are arranged nearly every year, so students likely would gain first-hand knowledge of the complicated logistics involved, would be able to interact with scientists at foreign institutions, and would become familiar with a large number of observatory facilities.
Students learn modern data reduction and analysis techniques using available software.
The latter are structured so that students could feasibly develop useful, special purpose analysis software. The primary motivation for imaging stellar outer atmospheres, for example, is to isolate the emission from discreet, magnetically- active regions. The spectrum of the active region then serve as input to semi-emprical atmospheric modeling codes. These atmospheric models, in turn, permit us to evaluate various energy storage, transport, and release mechanisms. These sometimes take exotic forms, such as flares that are millions of times more energetic than solar flares.