Tours, Topcat, and Tiredness

Mornings, in case you haven't already realized, suck. I had the same problem with not sleeping in till my alarm went off, which has led to me not catching up on sleep from my two hour night the morning we left.  At least I chose not to go with Maxime to another workout, which would have been a short but still probably grueling abs workout (any abs workout is difficult for me). At 7:50, I quickly tossed my binder, laptop, textbook, and water bottle into a bag and brushed my teeth before heading down to breakfast. Today they had pancakes, which were an unexpected treat, and one that paired well with the fresh blueberries provided.

On my way out of the dining hall, Terry, another Physics of Stars student, asked me if I knew how to get to the building, and I had only a small memory of what the RAs had said, so we just walked towards the general area I knew it was located in. I was a bit confused by the building labeled astrophysics not looking like the one I thought I remembered our class was supposed to be in, but after checking the instructor's email and looking up the room number online, we figured out that the class was actually in the Kersten Physics Teaching Center just a block down the road. We made it to class with a few minutes to spare, and our instructor, Gourav Khullar, greeted us all kindly. Gourav is a Phd candidate who researches galaxies at the astrophysics center on site where I thought the class was located.

The telescope that we will visit at
the Yerkes Observatory.

After we had all sat down and introduced ourselves, we moved from the nice, well air-conditioned room to a computer lab just across the hall. He then gave us a brief description of what we would be doing today, and led us out on a tour of the two main buildings related to the class on campus (Those being the physics building and the astrophysics building). After our tour had concluded, we did a short activity where we chose our favorite type of celestial object and did a little bit of research on it, then explained a few key facts about it to the rest of the class. He then introduced us to Stellarium, a program that allows one to view the night sky to a small degree of magnification. He also asked us about what we wanted to learn from the class, as he was okay with modifying the schedule to match our desires. The rest of the day was going over in more depth a few concepts and vocab words that the textbook had explained to us in layman's terms and using another piece of software, Topcat, to analyze a set of data describing nearby stars.

A firefly from nearby the library.

Back in my dorm, I realized that I needed to figure out how to get the staples in my head removed (injury from a summer camp, I ran into a tree usual badass fashion), so I called Student Health to see if I could schedule an appointment. Apparently they required a "Student Life Fee" that had not been paid, so they suggested I try to on-site hospital. After consulting my parents and checking the ER wait time, I found out that going there would be expensive and take forever, so the plan (hopefully) to go to the urgent care facility a few miles away tomorrow.

That all took an hour, so I soon went down to dinner with a couple other members of the Thangaraj house, and afterwards we all went to the Monsueto Library to study for our respective classes. It was a nice day, and although I was quite tired I still learned a lot on my first day of class (which I cannot say for my normal high school classes). I'm really looking forward to the lab we are doing tomorrow, and I'll report back then. Good night!

The inside of the Monsueto Library.

P.S. I think I may have an awful alliteration addiction.