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Wednesday, October 16, 2019. 4:00PM. Webinar: Analyzing Images is Harder than You Think. Craig DeForest, SWRI. Sponsored by NCAR|UCAR. More information here. 

Image analysis is a mainstay of solar physics.  Images, spectral images, and polarimetry are central to the corpus of data that we use to understand the Sun.  These kinds of data have many advantages: they are information-rich, viscerally compelling, and intuitively obvious to anyone who has eyes.   But image analysis, while disarmingly easy at a superficial level, is surprisingly difficult to get right. Visual cues that are familiar from everyday experience can divert us to wrong interpretations; subtle linkages create surprising artifacts (for example, resolution effects can mimic scale height variations in the corona); and image data are often counterintuitive to interpret.  I illustrate, through cautionary examples, several subtleties of image analysis, advocate for rigor in image analysis, and describe some underappreciated tools and techniques that can help you improve your science.