576 Steps

Author: Morgan E.

As a standard lecture day, Monday started off normal. I woke up around 8:20 and immediately resumed my ongoing quest for coffee. Two days before I had heard that there were canned starbucks drinks in the NMSU library, however all three times I had checked the library had been locked. But this morning, I was confident the library was open. 

By nine I arrived in the classroom ready for the morning lecture with my coffee in hand. This morning Dr. Andersen was continuing his lectures on special and general relativity, a personal favorite of mine. He never fails to include historical anecdotes about the science, as well as plenty of geometric diagrams to quickly copy down. 

For lunch I was excited to see stir fry and orange chicken as the entree. After eating, I rushed back to the classroom to work on my centroiding code, an assignment that has stumped even the most proficient coders at SSP. 

Our afternoon lecture was with Dr. R where he showed us how to improve the determined orbits for our asteroid. This lecture was a touch intimidating considering this method involves a whopping 576 steps, including a 6×6 matrix of partial derivatives. And no, I don’t really know what those words mean either. We were most surprised by the fact that previous SSP students had to do all of these calculations by hand and spent over a week doing these calculations by hand. Luckily (or not as I am not the best at python), we can code a program to run the equations for us. 

On Monday’s after dinner we have weekly dorm and research meetings. This week at the dorm meeting, Ms. Martinez encouraged us to talk to students we had not connected much with yet. Isabella and I told childhood stories, and Rajat and I talked about what job we wanted in ten years. After that we got to talk with our observing teams about our overall SSP experience. After the dorm meeting we met with Dr. Andersen to go over our research progress in the past week. We had one observing shift where we saw the asteroid for a second time, and we had made significant coding progress. 

My team ended the day with our fourth observing shift, however, there was rain and lightning, so we were not able to collect any data for fear of damaging the telescope. Overall, it was quite a normal day at SSP, intimidating lectures, stumping assignments, and cloudy observing shifts. But I managed to have fun working in the classroom working through these problems and talking with my peers. 

Dr. Andersens Lectures

Working on centroiding code

Dr. R’s scary 6×6 matrix of derivatives

Hanging out by the dorms

About me:

My name is Morgan and I am from Seattle Washington. In my free time  I dance ballet and work as a cashier at Chipotle. I am interested in astrophysics and cosmology, especially dark matter. I am a part of observing team 9 at SSP with Julia and Jayden.