After two days of boba-filled mall trips, incredibly exhilarating baseball games, and sketchy firework viewings from the tops of secluded hills, the morning of July 5th welcomed a relatively normal day.
Despite sleeping through both my roommate and I’s combined 28 alarms (unfortunately we are both the 5 more minutes type), we safely made it out of our dorm with enough time to run to the dining hall, inhale breakfast, chug a cup of necessary coffee, and slide into our chairs at 8:59am.
Morning lecture consisted of an explanation of Kepler’s problem with polar coordinates by the incredible Dr. Le. After a whirlwind of dot products, cross products, and partial derivatives, my friends and I decided to venture beyond the dining hall and explore the bookstore Panda Express.
At the conclusion of our much needed dining hall break, we all returned to Domenici Hall to hear from guest lecturer Dr. Larry Sverdrup, who showed us mind boggling science demonstrations and taught us about some of the most intriguing properties of science. After the rightfully dubbed mad(?) science show, my observing team set up our observing log for that day’s shift before leaving for formal dinner at the NMSU dining hall with our wonderful TA, Lucien.
After dinner, I worked on Astro Pset 2 before I had to leave for my 9pm TMO observing shift. Fortunately, despite being unable to open the dome during our first TMO shift due to clouds and rain, the night was clear and we were able to successfully open the dome. After about 30 minutes of agonizing over moving stars, telescope slewing problems, high wind speeds, and flipped star charts, we were finally able to take 5 sets of images of our asteroid’s supposed location
Upon our 11pm return to Domenici Hall, I speedran the rest of my Astro 2 Pset and submitted it a safe 13 minutes before the 11:59 deadline. We then returned to the dorms and had a well-deserved lobby snack/yap session as well as a short-lived volleyball session before being reprimanded for making too much noise at night.
Before bed, my roommate and I set our regular 28 alarms and proceeded to pass out. Whether or not we woke up to them the next day remains to be seen…
Update: We woke up at 8:44am.
Hey! My name is Siyona and I’m a rising senior at Westwood High School in Austin, Texas. Apart from STEM and especially calc, I love debate, listening to music, singing, and meeting new people. SSP has been a blast and I can’t wait for the rest!
