Knox College Astrophysics: Happy Day 6!
Even though it was the weekend, it was still a day filled with learning (and fun)!
Since it was the 4th of July, the dining hall was closed ☹️ but Dr. Kemper & the rest of the faculty made sure we were fed, providing some donuts, yogurt, granola bars, and fruit! I also made a matcha since I couldn’t go get my daily coffee from the dining hall.
After that, we had a lecture from Dr. Nathalie about telescope design! This was super interesting, as we were able to learn about how telescopes capture light that we can see. As someone who likes to play around with photography occasionally, the part about the lecture that stood out to me the most was when she talked about focal ratio, since I didn’t know that focal ratio was a measure of the ratio between the diameter of the primary lens and the effective focal length of a telescope!
After that, we headed over to the dining hall for lunch.
Even though it was the 4th of July, the Knox staff so kindly provided us a delicious lunch with burgers and ribs (shoutout to them – thanks!)
We had an extra long lunch today (not sure why), which was 2.5 hrs instead of the typical 1 hour lunch. With this extra time, Eesha and I went on a walk to look for the music building & practice rooms, but unfortunately the building was locked so I resorted to practicing in my room.
In the afternoon, we learned about kinematic, forces, and energy. I was glad to have understood most of this lecture, especially since I don’t have much physics foundation (never took a physics class before). Most of this was pretty familiar from AP Calc, so shoutout to my AP Calc AB & BC teachers for making my life here a bit easier ☺️
After the lecture from Dr. Nathalie, we put some of our knowledge into action. We implemented some code that modeled the concepts we just learned about! Unfortunately, Erina was having some troubles with her code ☹️ but we were able to quickly resolve it!
After that, we had a pizza dinner provided by Dr. Kemper and the rest of the faculty here!
We ended off the evening by working on our PSets. Most of us worked on Code PSet #1.
We took a quick break to go onto the roof to look at the fireworks (thanks Dr. Nathalie for letting us up!) even though they’re banned in Illinois. We took lots of pictures and had a great time!
And that’s it – thanks for coming along on day 6 at Knox!
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Abigail L.
Hi! My name is Abigail and I’m from Seattle, WA! Most of my time is spent towards violin, piano, and robotics and my favorite subjects at school are chemistry and math. I’m really excited to see what the rest of SSP has in store!
