Hey y’all! I’m Louis, and today’s sort of a sandwiched day at SSP NMT 2022. Yesterday we had our first break day, and tomorrow, we’ll go on a field trip to Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Regardless, it’s still a very busy day. In the morning, we started to go over multivariable calculus. We’ll need it in order to combine all of our astronomical variables to determine orbits. In the evening, we learned about how to use AstroImageJ, a program useful for combining, subtracting (removing noise and artifacts), and displaying images from our telescope. I’ll have two problem sets due, a research meeting to track my team’s progress in orbit determination, and I’ll finally be observing from 9 to 11 PM up at Etscorn Observatory today.
I’m glad I didn’t get the late shift from 1 to 3 AM. We’ll be on the bus tomorrow at 6 AM to drive to Los Alamos, which will take around 3 hours. Unfortunately for my friends Philip and Ryan (pictured below), they’ll be coming back to the dorms at 3 AM. Hopefully they get really good asteroid pictures for the lack of sleep they’ll be getting.
Like I said – I’ll be observing today. I’ll have to finish this blog post as well as the rest of Astro PS 2 so I can get enough sleep after my observation shift. Last week, my observing group came back from the telescope without any good data. Unfortunately, the clouds just passed over our view as we got there. Hopefully, we have clear skies today – although it’s not looking too promising.
Finally, speaking of skies – the sunsets here at NMT are seriously beautiful. Check out this one from a couple days ago:
Maybe there should be a field of science called “sunsetstronomy”. We could certainly study it at NMT!
