White Valentine's Day

Hi all!
So from Tuesday night to Wednesday night Ithaca received 19-20 inches of snow. Here are some photos:

Here's the view looking out from my apartment. This is at around 3 pm, and it continued to snow for another 6 hours after this photo was taken. My poor car is on the far right.



Here's a view out my bedroom window look towards the hotel.



This is what my car looked like Thursday evening when I went to dig it out. What you can't see is the foot and a half of snow between the drivers-side of my car and the car next to me. It was a sore reminder of what I hate most about winter.




Zu meinen deutchen Freunde...Schöne Weiberfastnacht!

Snow Day!

Hi all!
So not much is getting accomplished here thanks to the SNOW DAY! It's my first snow day in 5 years, so I'm excited. Over night we received about a foot of snow, and it's supposed to keep falling until later tonight.
Otherwise things are going well. Classes are interesting. So my favorite class is probably "Physics of Black Holes, Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs". Hard to imagine why I might like that one. I'm also taking a class on optical, infrared and submilimeter instrumentation. My third class is a planetary science class on planetary surface processes. I'm somewhat out of place in this one as I'm not a planetary scientist, but I find it really interesting. My justification is that it will make me more well rounded, but really I just think it's cool. In addition to my classes (as though that wasn't enough work), I hope to get back to work on the spectrometer I worked on while in Bonn. And I'm playing in the orchestra again. So I'm just a little bit busy.

Let's see...non-academic highlights from the semester. Several weeks ago I saw the movie "Children of Men". Very, very good. Not an easy film to watch, you may need to watch a Disney movie afterward, but excellent. Last weekend I volunteered at a Space Day event at a aeronautics museum, and really enjoyed it. It's nice to get out to events like this and remind myself why it is that I do astronomy in the first place.
Ok...this list is too short. I clearly am working too much.

Here's something I discovered while working on a project for my surfaces class.
Google Mars: www.google.com/mars

I guess that's all for now.