Spilled Cereal Pt 2

So I spilled my cereal on myself again today. This time all over my skirt, my leg, and my backpack. It was so bad that I had to rinse the milk stained part of my skirt in the sink in Kersten and turn it so the wet part was less visible. I may not intend to spill my cereal on myself often, but at least it gives me an interesting start to my blog.

This morning in class I was beyond excited. Our morning activity was calculating the distance to the Sun. As usual I worked with Carly and Nikita. Since Carly is only going into 10th grade, she hasn't taken trigonometry yet, which made the work a bit more difficult for her.

Olivia and and grape

Nikita and I didn't have any trouble with the math, but the overall concept and getting up to the part where math came into play was difficult. There were a few aspects I didn't grasp in the beginning, as I was so bothered by the fact that we were acting like Earth's orbit was a circle, when it's really a slight ellipse. Once the instructors told me about the small difference in the answer and how it could roughly be corrected by making the distance a range it worked out a lot better. It took us a while to get where we needed to be, but I didn't really care, as the more questions we asked about the data the more we learned.

As someone who might want to be an astrophysicist I was worried that working more with data and math with make me annoyed with the subject and less likely to pursue it, but so far the more labs we do the more excited  get about figuring out information for myself instead of just looking it up. I really enjoy the excitement I feel every time I understand why something is the way it is, as opposed to being told that it just is that.

I hung out in the lobby at lunch after eating some food and ran into Nikita and Carly there, along with Olivia's friend from her creative writing course named Ellie. I got to talk to Jahnvi a bit during the lunch break too, and Nikita and her compared heights.

In the afternoon my class found the luminosity of the Sun. It was by far my favorite lab. The information they gave us was vague, just that the distance and flux could help us find the luminosity. After sitting for a few minutes feeling like my mind was on the edge of figuring out the answer, Carly said something about a sphere and our minds all clicked. Nikita legitmately cheered after we confirmed our answer was right, and it was so fun to really figure something out, and know you understood it.

After class Nikita and I went to the library to finish our labs. After dinner both Michelle and Jahnvi were stressed about their class, so we all tried to do our best to help.

Today was interesting, a little stressful, but all around fun.

Joe and Rika Mansueto Library