My host family was nice enough to invite me to Maine with them to stay at a house they rented on an island off the coast called Little Diamond Island. Unfortunately, I fell ill with a cold a day before I left. Fortunately, that caused me to be unable to smell the horrific stench of fish that lingered on the docks where the ferry boat picked me up.
This is me and my entire host family about to embark the boat to get back to the mainland of Maine
The island was beautiful with beaches lining much of it, about 50 cottages and no cars or roads; only golf carts and dirt paths. The grass was a bright shade of green and the sun was shining the entire time. But because I was sick I spent much of my time reading the book “The Boys in the Boat” which is about the Washington University rowing team and the quest to win at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It’s a pretty good book to say the least. Also, during the week I went and saw the newish “Jurassic Park” movie. I thought it was pretty good compared to many of the Hollywood films that have come out recently, but it could have been better. Living in Telluride I forgot about how massive movie theaters are in large cities, I mean those things are massive.
That is me accidental not looking at the camera, standing on the dock on the island
Anyway here is what I did at the CfA.
I have been writing code to change data from wavenumbers and wavelengths, which is a very interesting process. It would normally only take 20 seconds to do as a wavenumber is 1/wavelength in centimeters and the wavelengths I’m using are just in nanometers, but since there are millions of data points it takes a while, even for a computer. I have just been using arrays of data to isolate the x and y coordinates in a data point and then converting them in separate loops. I am then using these new wavelengths along with spectral resolution data to write more code which puts everything all together in a meaningful way. I am really liking Python, the programming language I’m doing all of this stuff with. It was very easy to grasp compared to most other languages, and really lets me know with a great amount of certainty what exactly I am doing with it.For instance, printing out a line in Python is just: print(‘Hi, my name is Elliot’). So if anyone is looking to learn a programming language for the first time, try Python.
My office mates are from Boston and Minnesota and are very nice people. Also, I went on an official tour of the CfA with the rest of the high school interns led by one of the astronomers there. There are only about eight of them, and aside from my office mates, I have only seen the other interns once, which was at that tour, as the building is so big. I got to see the over 100-year telescope they have (but don’t use for good reasons) as well as the place where they store all of the plates that have recorded images of the night ski from long before any digital recording devices came along, which was pretty cool. I didn’t get to see the laser lab though, so that’s still on the list.
Massachusetts Avenue is where I usually go looking for restaurants to eat lunch in, as their prices are very reasonable and the food is very good. I also saw a very funny thing that was very Boston-like: A taxi driver made an illegal turn and a guy in a separate car with his arm out of his window holding a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee got really angry and started cursing at the taxi driver in a very thick Boston accent, then proceed to pour his Dunkin’ Donuts coffee through the taxi driver’s open window into the taxi. It was pretty funny to the observers as you can probably imagine.
Overall, this week was pretty good. I am nearly not sick, and the band thing is getting along. I was told by my mentor Gonzalo that the clarinet I’m playing on is a Czech, Soviet-era clarinet and was sold to Gonzalo’s parents in a store in Spain many years before I was born. It still plays very good, so that is pretty cool.
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