Day Two at Yerkes

Yes, I know the title and the lack of a blog yesterday is confusing, but it was for a good reason. Class let out at 12:20 in the morning, which is a bit too late to write a blog (I speak from experience here). If I had tried to write it then, it probably have taken forever to complete it, as my eloquence after midnight is (at best) comparable to that of an angry donkey.

  Astronomy for the blind: one of the many amazing
projects here at Yerkes.

I woke up more comfortably than usual today, still relishing my double-queen-bed "single" room. I was tired from the late night before, but after a bit of coffee and walking up the trail to the observatory, I was ready for the day ahead. We had a quiz at the very beginning of class, which in six questions solidly encompassed most of what we studied last week. We then spent a couple of minutes going over the answers to each of the questions.

Below the 40-inch telescope.

For the next hour or so, we worked on coming up with project ideas and checking in with our teachers to see whether or not they would actually work, if any tweaks could be made to improve it, and receive suggestions for a project if we were truly stumped. I was originally going to work alone on binary stars and their orbits, but I realized that it was a bit too similar to a project that someone else had done. I joined up with another two people left stranded, and our teacher recommended that we observe a very luminous blue star and a very luminous red star using both the 40-inch refracting telescope and the 24-inch reflecting telescope. We plan on using the 24-inch telescope to see how the stars look with different filters and using the 40-inch telescope as an interferometer to measure the size of both stars. An interferometer is a device with two apertures that measures the interference between waves of light to determine the angular size of the star in the night sky.

We broke for lunch at 12 and returned at 2, which was a significant improvement from the schedule at the University of Chicago, which was only an hour. I say only, but this was still a step up from the 35 minutes at my high school. Still, it is nice to never feel hurried when eating and still have time to grab something from our room and/or have a solid conversation.

There were three options available for the next few hours: listen to a lecture by our TA, Aldo, on supernova remnants, listen to a lecture by Gourav on star nurseries, or watch a demonstration of interferometry. I chose the last one, as my group actually needs to know what we are doing when we take observations.

The study room we used to work on our project.

The only thing left to do was for people who planned on using the archives here in their project to find what they would need. It only took about half an hour, after which we were let out to go to dinner. I finished quickly and began this blog, before heading back up for the start of evening class at eight. Gourav facilitated a discussion on diversity and why it is important, followed by free time to work on our projects and take observations from either of the two telescopes. It was a rather busy day, and we got back late again, but I'm glad we are making the most of the time we have. Good night!