I’ve come to realize that time behaves a little bit differently at SSP, as if I’m in a different world. The setting sun actually marks the beginning of your daily routine rather than its end.
Everyday after the end of the afternoon lectures, all 36 of our fellow SSPer’s gather for dinner. We head down to the C4C cafeteria, where we relax, enjoy the amazing food, and recharge our batteries to readily start the part two of our days!
Dinner is rather formal. We all get to dress up and have some nice conversations with each other, Dr. D, Dr. F, and the TA’s!
( Andreas and Suksuk not forgetting to take out ice cream as extra replenishment)
When dinner is over, comes the unstructured time. Most of us are wise enough to use this time to meet up at the SBO(the observatory), where we collaborate to collectively struggle through the Pset problems as a group.
(We are here to work on the psets but all sorts of things happen as you can see from the pictures above.)
As everyone works laboriously through the pset problems, each team begins to take their turns for the highlight of the day, going onto the observing deck to use the telescopes and make some cool observations! Observation is split into three different sessions in which each session lasts an hour for 2 teams of 3.
Something notable for our team today was how much more efficient and quicker we had become compared to our first observation run. As Carlin ,the commander, gave out orders, Uluc, the recorder, and I, the operator, cordially followed and executed the steps with our best efficiency and coordination.
We ended up completing our mission of the night early, and the result was something rewarding: 10 minutes of spare time to point and shoot the pictures of any dso of our choice. We decided to point our telescope to the Pinwheel galaxy(M101) to observe the supernova that had recently taken place.
We only took a single long exposure picture of the galaxy, so a lot of noise and dust donuts appeared within the frame, but we plan to take several more light frames along with darks and flats for the galaxy over the course of the next several days to get more sharp and crisp images!
Howdy y’all! My name is Jay, and I’m an aspiring aerospace engineer from Dallas, Texas! I am currently participating in the SSP at CUB for astrophysics, and so far, I have thoroughly enjoyed my first week here! In my free time, I enjoy exploring space in my own ways such as doing astrophotography, playing ksp and watching movies!
