Day 01 homework, due Aug 29

Briefly (one paragraph) describe why you are taking this course and what you hope to get out of it.

    My research interest is in learning and working with Cloudy. You are the originator of the software, so I want to learn what you know. The story I have in my head is that Cloudy grew around solving and explaining problems in astrophysics related to spectroscopy. I never asked directly, but it seems reasonable to assume that many of those problems are going to be described and practiced in this course. More generally, I want to learn about as many astrophysical phenomena as I can. Within the limit of taking required courses, the topical course requirement allows for only one astrophysics course. Given the nature of the course, I suspect (or hope?) this class surveys a wide breadth of phenomena. With these two important criteria satisfied by the course, attending it is a no-brainer.

Did you see the solar eclipse? Briefly describe what you saw if you did.

    Yes! I was surprised that, visually, I barely noticed the eclipse even past 75% coverage, unless I looked directly at the sun's disk with glasses. After something around 75%, it became noticeably dimmer, and eventually I saw earthly things in a color I don't remember seeing before. It was something like a dark blue. At some point, the moon became visible as part of a black disk across the sun, and it looked like a hole in the sky, which eventually gobbled up the last bit of bright light from the sun. After that, surrounding this hole, I could see the dimmer shine of the sun's corona, with a few outward streams of light-emitting gases converging to tips at a distance about 2 solar disk radii from the center. I expected them to be longer. For about 2.5 minutes, I sat back and watched the streams as I pondered the magnetohydrodynamics of the beast. When the sun's disk peered its brighter light around the back edge of the moon's obscuring disk, it was strikingly bright, like a laser shining in my direction, and that was the last I saw.


Why kind of laptop (Linux, Mac, Windows) do you have?

    Linux

What experience have you had with Linux utilities such as ssh or ftp? “None” is a perfectly fine answer.

    Very experienced