Aurora Borealis

Earlier this week I was able to see the Northern Lights for the first time. They were amazing to see, photos and videos that I've seen before don't do them justice.

I've finished my second week of school now, and my impressions haven't changed a whole lot. The pace is starting to pick up, but they're all still generally easy classes for them most part. The most challenging thing so far has been trying to get the online homework to submit my answers correctly.

The leaves on the trees are starting to change pretty quickly now, and we're losing about five minutes of sunlight a day. People are saying that this winter is supposed to be really harsh, and seeing as UAF hasn't had a snow day I better get my winter driving.

In my drawing class, we've just finished our linear perspective unit and we're about to move on to colour and value. For the final piece we had to draw multiple object that were overlapping each other and make sure that they looked like they were in three dimensional space.

From the critique that we did as a class, I got the feedback that my lines should have been bolder, and that I could have put a bit more detail into it - I would have done so if I had more time but I didn't give myself enough for this project.

During the one of our classes we went to the University's old bowling alley that's now shut down. It's an older one, and though I only got one picture it was cool to see some of the older A-2 pinsetters.

As for my computer science course, we're just now getting into the control flow of programs - this is still pretty basic stuff, but there are some fun assignments that we've had to do for homework. One of the projects we've had to do is creating a program that prints diamonds to the screen in a size that the user chooses. This was a bit harder than I anticipated, but it was a nice exercise in how I might go about more complex problems.

Some of the other programs we made converted miles to kilometers, or printed a battleship-esque grid you could plot points on. We're steadily getting more and more advanced as people in the class get more comfortable with the tools we need to be using. If you're interested in that kind of thing you can always check out the GitHub repo.

Going back to seeing the northern lights for the first time, here are some pictures I took this week. That's all for this post, until the next one I hope everyone reading stays safe and enjoys themselves.