Polargrams

 Here are some calibration measurements I've done! I rotate a polarizer through 360 degrees with a small step and take a picture at each point. Really, its an s polarization picture and a p polarization picture in one! Then, I choose a region of interest (a small number of pixels that could represent a single nanorod) and plot the intensity of s light and p light together. 

Teflon diffuses the polarization of light, but we can still see that the "red" s light is consistently brighter than the "blue" p light. That was part of my calibrations from last week.  

If a sample doesn't have an orientation, say if its round like a latex bead, we get something like this: 

And if we aren't looking at a real object at all and see only background, it looks like this: 

A nanorod may look very similar to the Teflon calibration sample, but the width of the "peanut" shape and the relative intensity between s and p can change. That ratio is one way I want to try simplifying this data. Having a polargram for every pixel in our image, or even ever 25 square pixels in our image, would be too overwhelming to analyze.