Workload of a Week

I've finally found the optimal routine. Wake up at 7:50, shower and brush at 7:55, eat breakfast at 8:20, and leave for class at 8:45. All with the optimal sleep of about nine hours. You would think that it would work out pretty well. At least I did. Sadly, people are not very cooperative with my sleeping plans, and it seemed like half the house was sitting around my door talking until 2 AM. Luckily, I had my trusty earplugs with me that I had brought from the summer camp before this, and I slept like a baby (or at least a slightly unhappy one). Apparently the approximately eight hours were sufficient, as I have not felt tired at all throughout the day (and that is without the help of coffee).

Anyways, back to the important part of my day. Class started off with a lecture on luminosity, which is an intrinsic quality quantifying the amount of light a star emits in total. Luminosity is very hard to find, though, as it is hard to tell proximity and luminosity apart. Because of this, we instead often use flux, which is the light that an observer sees at a given distance. Flux is usually described in terms of apparent magnitude, a scale that describes how bright an object appears from our vantage point here on Earth.

We also covered blackbodies, essentially idealized stars that to not reflect light and emit all light they absorb. Blackbodies are useful because they show us the inversely proportional relationship between wavelength and heat of a star, and how hotter stars emit the maximum amount of radiation at a shorter wavelength. This led us to spectrographs, as they are effectively a different way of representing Planck's curve. This flowed very smoothly into our lab with professor Kron in the afternoon.

In this lab, we went up into the dome at the top of the building, looked at a scattered portion of sunlight from the atmosphere, took a picture of said light, and saw how the spectral lines from our picture matched a spectrograph of the sun. Spectral lines are, in short, the unique signature (in the form of missing wavelengths) that an element leaves on light as it is passed through. The lab was really cool, and Gourav said that we would be able to use the same equipment on future projects as well, which I am quite excited for.

After class, a few other students mentioned that there was to be a pickup game of soccer on a field just south of campus. I am not the best at the sport, but I do enjoy both playing and watching it greatly, so I decided to join them. A massive 40 students from all of the houses showed up, so we split into a few different groups so that we could play something resembling the standard 11v11. I did not do great, as was expected, but I still got a bit of fresh air and exercise, which was the goal (pun not intentional) anyway.

After speed walking back to campus north just before dinner hours ended, I ate dinner quickly and showered, then went down to the basement to do my laundry. I had foolishly forgotten to bring quarters, but a few kind souls saved me and I was able to start the load rather quickly.

The coin laundry.

We covered a lot in class today, and I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around some of the concepts, but it is great to finally have a class that's going too fast for me instead of the opposite. Good night!