Friday the 13th

It's supposed to be an unlucky day today, but surprisingly nothing horrible has happened. In fact, it was rather nice, with the exception of, you guessed it, my sleep. I stayed up until one or two yesterday morning talking with some other people in my house, which meant that I got a not-so-horrible six hours. Not great, but enough to function on, especially with the help of coffee. I don't usually drink it, but I thought I'd try it out so as to not fall asleep in the middle of class. Surprisingly, I barely even noticed the effects, but I didn't pass out at an inopportune time, so it must at least be doing its job a little bit.

At the start of class, we gave 1-minute presentations in pairs about different aspects of atoms and the Doppler effect. The latter was the main focus of the first few hours of class. Essentially, the Doppler effect is when an object is moving, and the waves (in astrophysics, these are almost always light waves) in front of the object are compressed and the ones behind it are spread out. Because the universe is expanding, all stars are moving away from us, and the wavelength of their radiation is stretched (turning them redder, because red is the color with the longest wavelength).

We left for lunch 45 minutes early, which was a pleasant surprise, as the math explaining the Doppler effect and red shift was beginning to feel like too much for my simpleton mind. Lunch was typical, and I headed back to the classroom as soon as I had finished. The second half of the day was mostly analysis of the data we had gathered from the lab the day before. We used the DS9 software to create graphs based on the location of spectral/absorption lines (see earlier blogs) on our images taken yesterday, and then tried to identify which lines corresponded to which elements in the sun's atmosphere. At the end of class, we learned what our weekend homework would be and the schedule for our projects over the course of the next week.

The Taste of Chicago Festival.

As soon as I returned to Thangaraj house from my class, I learned that a lot of people were going to check out Taste of Chicago, an enormous food festival just south of Millennium Park. I thought it might be fun to get outside a bit and try some good food, so I decided to go with. The transportation took forever, as was expected (there is approximately one bus every thirty minutes that passes by campus), and after waiting for a short while we collectively decided to just walk to the train station. The train also took what seemed like an eternity to come. I usually don't have a problem with waiting, but the heat was atrocious, making standing (or walking) around for long periods of time not particularly comfortable.

Once we had arrived at the festival, I soon discovered that the food was massively overpriced, but I was already there, and I was not going to skip dinner for the sake of being frugal. It was pretty cool, however, to be able to eat just about any sort of cuisine you desired, all within a short walking distance. There was also a concert, but we decided to pass on it, as we only had two hours before we needed to meet back up with the main group to go home.

Shortly after our arrival, I joined a few others on another walk, this time to explore campus. We tried to enter the physics and astrophysics buildings, to no avail. However, we came across an undergraduate student who happened to be heading to the Sky Lounge in the UChicago hospital, so we decided to join him. We discussed his major, math, as well as how he got into the school, which were both interesting topics.

The Thangaraj commons.

The night was still young, so I went down to the Thangaraj commons, and later the garden, to talk with a few others. It was a great but long day, so I am looking forward to sleeping in and napping on the weekend. Good night!