JACEE Technology

Software

TRACK

A text-based PC program to trace electron showers through an emulsion chamber and locate their vertex. Track takes away the traditional tedious bookkeeping and calculations required for a the scanner (a human being) to find the interaction, letting them instead concentrate on the other difficult task of actually seeing the interaction. (Contact E.O. for info.)

McShower

Graphics-and-video-based PC program to trace individual secondaries down from an interaction. A shower is made up of hundreds or thousands of tracks left behind by particles produced from the original cosmic ray. McShower facilitates the study of these tracks by overlaying computer generated displays onto video images of emulsions, allowing a person to "point and click" to measure the locations of these daughter particles. (Contact E.Z. for info.)

Densitometry Fitter

Used for fitting energy curves in X-ray film density spots.

Blackbox

A detailed description of the flight recorders used for JACEE-11 through -14

Digital video-based program for the ultimate in high-cost security. Unless you already happen to have the stuff lying around, that is. It has nothing to do with JACEE, but our lab was broken into last year, and we're taking precautions to see that it doesn't happen again. This program performs real-time frame comparisons, looking for changes (motion) between frames. Images containing motion are saved through a network to a computer in another room. Click here for a security movie produced from sentinel images, showing our janitor doing his usual nightly routine.

Hardware

UCB Microscope

For tracing showers, we have a sophisticated digitized microscope originally from UC Berkeley. The motorized stage has a precision of 1/2 micron, travel of about 30x20 centimeters, and is connected directly to a PC. For interaction analyses (not required for JACEE spectrum work), we use a digital video system integrated with the stage. (McShower, above)

E.O., E.Z.