Week Three and Four

Hey Y'all,
So it is currently approaching the end of the fourth week and I'll be heading home soon for a couple days so figure I'll keep you all updated.

Week Three
This was the week I first went to SUNY-ESF in Syracuse to use their SEM, very exciting! I went Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, all for about four hours each day. This particular model was the Joel 5800 SEM which works particularly good for the SEM imaging mode, but most definitely not the BSE compo mode, the contrast and brightness knobs were especially frustrating, I'd like to thank Rob Smith, the SEM technician for helping me out with those difficult moments. I have gotten around twenty pics for each sample (there are seven samples) and had about 5 framboids in each BSE image...so I have my work cut out for me counting and measuring in excess of 700 framboids! That weekend John, Dr. Boyer, Emily, "California" Emily, and I went to the annual Museum of the Earth Symposium in Ithaca and spent the day with Dr. Carl Brett, a prominent paleontologist, touring the finger lakes area looking at Devonian age outcrops. It was a blast and a great learning experience, my thanks to Carl Brett. Finishing that weekend off, John and I went back to Witaker Falls State park to collect samples for his research. We stayed overnight at the campsite there and collected some more sample upstream of the falls the next day.

Week Four
Monday John and I were finishing up collecting samples at Witaker Falls. Tuesday I was able to get started on the analysing of the Framboid images using the Jimage program I downloaded through the NIH website. I've all ready went through three samples and have made histograms of them! And I plan on finishing up the rest of the samples today! Oh also on Tuesday John, Dr. Boyer, and I went to present for the Math club in Mahar, the presentations went well and I hope they learned something. All right I'm off to go look at those framboids...here's some for you...