Let's Get Down To Business

Kersten Physics Teaching Center

I woke up this morning full of nervous energy. I had completed the assigned homework last night, but I was anxious to get to my class and see how much I liked it. I was a little nervous about how many girls would be in the class considering that it's a Astronomy course, and I had heard there weren't many girls in the course. I got my breakfast without the cereal fuss of yesterday, and walked to the Kersten Physics Teaching Center.

The second I walked into the class I was surprised. I had expected to be a classroom used for lectures, but it was a lab room, everyone sitting in stools with their laptops out. I was about 15 minutes early, but since today was the first day many people were already there. About 10 minutes later Carly came in with her friend Nikita and they sat down next to me. 

When class began it was far more casual than I expected. I had prepared myself for my class to be six hours of solid lecture, but luckily that wasn't the case. We got basic information we needed for the first project, and how to use the programs involved with it. The project was to find out information about a well known star and create a poster. The groups were chosen randomly, but I still ended up working with Carly. We worked on the posters and project until just after lunch. 

After lunch our second project began. We were to use a website to find the spectrum of stars with varying temperatures. We then would do a long exposure to get light from the Sun and match the spectrum to find the approximate temperature of the Sun. Since our class has three instructors, Elizabeth Ramseyer, Richard Kron, and Richard DeCoster, it was really easy to get help every time I needed it while figuring out the assignment.

In order to collect the information we needed for the assignment we had to climb up two flights of stairs and go into the dome which holds the telescope on top of the building. Halfway up the first flight of stairs I felt the temperature increase dramatically, it must've raised at least ten degrees.

Professor Kron explained how the spectrometer we would be using works, and set it up. It was raining outside so we had to turn the dome multiple times before it was the right place to get sunlight and stay dry. After running our trials we went downstairs and shared the data, before leaving as it was already past 4. 

I'd say I'm pretty happy to back to class tomorrow.