Week 4 has been a bit frustrating from a technology standpoint (Halibut, as a reminder, is my desktop at Benson). I’m at the point where I’ve processed and marked all of the images from our drone flight last Monday, and tried to create the dense cloud three times this week. This process usually takes over 24 hours as there is so much data to work through, so you can imagine my disappointment when finding Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning (today) that something happened overnight to stop the process. Technically, it didn’t have a mystery problem on Thursday, but I clicked a single, seemingly harmless button on Halibut and the whole shebang froze, forcing me to power down and try again. We’ve since realized that, despite Halibut’s all-encompassing power, we might be asking a bit too much and it’s running out of memory mid-process and shutting down. Hopefully splitting the images into two batches and then merging the resulting models together will do the trick. Katy and I have another field trip to the Chalk Cliffs on Monday so I’ll find out Tuesday if the dense cloud was a success. If so, I can start analyzing how the ground control points are impacting model accuracy!
Since I didn’t have any photo ops this week, here’s one I snapped of my PhD Candidate office-mate, Charlie – clearly, I need to step up my geology t-shirt game.
Until next time!
Jess
Charlie displaying, in true rock nerd form, exactly why geologists are awesome
