Blog July 23rd + 24th

This is the start of the blog post for July 23rd: 

July 23rd, a big day to celebrate some birthday. Wait, did I say some? Yes, let’s wish happy birthday to our dear 2024 SSP participant, the very nice and lovely…(Drumrolls please)…Heather! 

And happy birthday to……Uchiha Sasuke! From Naruto (sorry). 

July 23rd was a great day for both some huge surprises and huge chaos. Just to recap, we had the last lecture of Quantum Mechanics from 9:00 am to 11:00 am, and a guest lecture from Dr. Jason Jackiewicz for the afternoon. Then…Ok, let’s stop here, and we’ll get into the details now. 

For Dr. Anderson’s morning lecture, he released us around an hour early, so that we can work on our OD code. There, my teammate Sean and I (Unfortunately our team only has two people) decided on the pretty pictures we wanted to take images of. Our first choice was the Lagoon Nebula, with the first alternative being the Cat’s Paw Nebula and the second alternative being the Pinwheel Galaxy. Sean confidently said that he could represent the team, so he would be attending the pretty pictures meeting at 1:00pm. 

After lunch, I wanted ice-cream, good ice-cream, so I ignored the ice-cream offered at the cafeteria, and I marched to the Book Store with Amanda and Amber. At the Book Store, we ordered Frappuccino from Starbucks (technically, that’s not ice-CREAM, but it’s better than cafeteria ice-cream). It was at this moment that Amber made an adventurous decision: she wanted to order a new flavor, something other than Mocha Frappuccino. How wonderful! We suggested her to order the Chocolate Cookie Crumble Cream Frappuccino, which she agreed with a joyous smile on her face. 

And guess what? The Book Store Starbucks ran out of cookie crumble! 

Well, sadly, no adventures for anyone today. Amber ordered the usual Mocha Frappuccino. 

On the way back, Dr. Rengstorf sent the observing choices for our pretty pictures. I looked at team 12, which is my team, and discovered that we did not get the Lagoon Nebula! (╯▔皿▔)╯

Now let’s travel to the future. I asked Sean a day or two later why he didn’t get the Lagoon Nebula. He said that it’s because they made the decision based on a 12-sided dice. Guess what? The first person picked the Lagoon Nebula (Which coincidently appeared to be Team 8, the team who had the same asteroid 1999 JN3 as us). 

Okay, we like democracy, so I’ll take it. Cat’s Paw Nebula is pretty cool. Yes. 

The afternoon lecture was about the Sun and starquakes, but that is not the most important thing. What’s more important is that we had this guest lecture combined with Astro II, and right after the lecture, the program discovered that someone in Astro II caught COVID! 

Then there was chaos. We wiped our dorms, wore masks, and sat in separate tables for dinner. By the way, I actually had a lower risk of catching COVID or any other viruses because I had neither a roommate nor suitemates. But except from that, things are just terrible. The N95 mask was itching my nose, and it was hard to breath. 

Also, by the way, on the way to Domenici, my dear friend Jasmine observed a bunch of pigeons on the grass. She tried to catch one, but she failed unfortunately but expectingly. I have a video, but I can’t post it because she didn’t consent, so here’s a picture of her:

We worked intensively on our MoG codes for the next few hours. Well, it’s actually mostly me because I wrote the code on Saturday and tried for three days, attempting to debug it and failed. In fact, I dragged our TA Lucien over the whole night to try to debug it, but I failed to complete it by midnight, sadly. Spoiler alert, I did finish it tomorrow though. 

Around 8pm, we celebrated Heather’s birthday with apple pies (wait, what about Sasuke’s birthday?). Since we didn’t have eating utensils, the guys started an eating contest, eating a slice of the pie with only their mouths.

From the left to the right—-Joey, Dhanush, Jinu, Jason, Kevin

That was a pretty exciting day. Up until the point that we got notified of this unfortunate news: our field trip to Carlsbad Caverns, on July 24th, was cancelled due to this COVID incident. Nooooooo /(ㄒoㄒ)/~~

And this unfortunate news ends my blog for July 23rd. Thank you for reading…Nope. No, no, no. Sadly, I had a long day. I also have a late observing shift today. 

The observing went pretty well, with our team finally focusing the telescope. The team before us tried to mess up the focus, I believe, but they forgot to change the default focus, so it did nothing. 

During the shift, we talked with our TA Mr. Kowalski about QoD 30 (wear professional suits/dresses for, spoiler’s alert, the theatre trip tomorrow with bonus points for denying gender norms). My teammate Sean somehow decided to wear a dress, and since he’s too tall to borrow anyone else’s, he decided to wear a toga. 

We will end the blog here because sadly, our data for this night was not good enough to find our asteroid. We end up not using this data, sadly. 

This truly concludes my blog for July 23rd. Thank you for reading this long blog. 

Sincerely, 

Eileen


This is the start of the blog for July 24th: 

Yes, it is me again. Why? Because the 23rd was actually not supposed to be my blog date, but I covered for another participant because I wanted to type more. This Monte Carlo is literally taking a century to run. I regret putting in 1 million iterations. 

Anyways, we were going to have a field trip to Carlsbad Caverns, but it got cancelled due to COVID. We were supposed to not have a field trip, but our lovely Site Director Ms. Martinez arranged an alternative for us. According to TA Mr. Kowalski, he fought for us to see Despicable Me 4 after the cancellation. 

However…Do you remember? QoD 30? 

Yes, apparently, most people went on a burning hot day, 34 degrees Celsius (sorry I’m Chinese), in suits. Yes, suits, because Mr. Kowalski and a few other guys were the only people who wore dresses. 

(IMG_3980 here please)

Mr. Kowalski had this luxurious, luminous, eye-catching dress that anyone could have worn. My friend Amber had commented that if you cover up his head, the dress unexpectedly matched Mr. Kowalski’s body. 

By the way, yes actually by the way, Sean tried to wear a toga (and he tried to let our TA Lucien put that on too). He got stopped unfortunately because we’re not allowed to bring bed sheets out of our dorm rooms.

Then there were the crazy bus trips. Can you imagine? 37 people with suits and dresses were crowding in a bus station, waiting for the bus. 

Please understand that this was not a field trip arranged in advanced, so therefore, we understand that a lot of things could go wrong. We thank Ms. Martinez greatly for arranging this trip for us, and we appreciate this trip neglecting all the things that did went wrong. 

On the way to the theatre, we were about 30 minutes late, and missed the start of the movie, but it’s fine because the movie was not heavily plot based. On the way back, however, it turned out that the bus was not coming for some reason, and we have to all wait in a Starbucks (yes, it’s Starbucks again) store to wait to be shuttled back to New Mexico State University. We left the theatre around 5pm; by the time everyone returned, it was around 7pm. 

It’s fine, though, because we got great images and laughter, which overcomes the hot heat and the time we’ve waited.

I spent the rest of the time working which gladly, verifying intermediate values with my dear friend Rachel, I found the error and got my MoG code working. What a nice day 🙂

Sincerely,

Eileen


Eileen: rising senior from Germantown Academy, Fort Washington, PA. She loves to play a variety range of video games, the recent ones being Terraria, Project Sekai, and Ark Knights. She also plays tennis and violin, and she recently tried to compose music, for classical orchestra and for modern trap music. As you can tell, she’s a little wordy online, but she’s actually relatively quiet in real life.