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Hi, I am Marcus

James Marcus Hughes

Research Computer Scientist at SwRI

I am a computer scientist with 3 years of working experience. I’m interested in software applications in solar physics, including machine learning. Currently, I’m working on building the data reduction pipeline for PUNCH. This will help scientists resolve mysteries about the solar corona and solar wind. In my spare time, I like photography, reading, sculpting with polymer clay, and many more things. I’m growing a digital garden. Check it out to explore my second brain.

Leadership
Python Development
Solving hard problems

Recent Posts

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Growing a digital garden

Writing blog posts regularly is difficult. They feel like a chore. I have an expectation that they should be a well-rounded piece of text (although you can see mine haven’t really been). They don’t link ideas together effectively. Instead, I’m embarking on growing a digital garden. Check it out at arbor.jmbhughes.com I hope to write regularly and document all kinds of things. Maybe I’ll sometimes convert them into longer form articles that will end up in this section of the website again; I’m not sure.

March 15, 2023 Read
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Automating SUVI YouTube

Intro The Sun is changing all the time. In order to identify interesting new events to study, a solar physicist must monitor data streams observing the Sun on a regular basis. I thought it might be neat to make a tool that would automatically download extreme ultraviolet images of the Sun from the GOES-R SUVI instrument and then upload them as a movie to YouTube for easy monitoring. My goal was to use Prefect to run the entire process on a schedule.

January 22, 2023 Read
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AIA temporal coloring

Temporal coloring I downloaded a few hours of AIA data in 171 Angstroms for another project. (For the non-solar people, AIA is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It takes pictures of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet.) I started playing around with it, and I ended up making the hypnotic and enchanting, at least in my opinion, video at the end of this post. It was a simple process.

June 3, 2022 Read