Welcome

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.

My current research focuses on calibrating and analysing solar data delivered by remote-sensing instrumentation.

As a postdoc, I am a member of the PHI/solo calibration team. I am carrying out detailed analysis of specific instrumental properties of the PHI instrument and writing calibration procedures to correct for the geometrical distortion, point spread function and straylight. In addition to co-aligning PHI data with the data products of other remote sensing instruments onboard.

I have a PhD in Solar Physics (2019) completed at the International Max Planck Research School for Solar System Science at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. As a doctoral student, I have analysed the Sunrise data obtained during its two missions in 2009 and 2013. I have used radiative transfer modeling to invert spectropolarimetric IMAX data and derive the magnetic field maps and other useful physical quantities. The aim of my thesis project was to investigate the relationship between the magnetic field and brightness contrast of small-scale magnetic elements in the quiet Sun and active region plages in wavelengths from the visible to the NUV. I also worked on characterising the stray light properties of the sunrise telescope.

In addition, I am currently extending the study of small-scale magnetic elements brightness to 3D radiative Magnetohydrodynamics simulations using the MURAM code. With deeper boxes which produce dark pores and surrounding plages elements, one can carry out a one-to-one comparison with the Sunrise 2 observations.

My publications can be found here:

I divide my PhD project into mini projects which I blog about in Sunrise . In there one can find useful codes to analyse the Sunrise data with their current format. In addition to my procedures and work on MURAM simulations.

Some of the calibration procedures which I have written for the SO/PHI instrument can be found in the Solar Orbiter page in a blog form. The posts in this blog aim to better comprehend the theory and execution of image processing of data products of (solar) telescopes. In particular, check my phase diversity code which I have written in Python to find the wavefront error of an optical system with a pair of focused and defocused images. It will be made into a package that could be installed.

Functions and procedures written in Python that are useful for scientific research and general data science can be found here

I included a list of my teaching and outreach activities, in addition to my Talks and posters in international conferences.

I blog about professional life and career in my blog. I also have a journal of my opinions and thoughts on different social and life matters.

Fatima Kahil