NMSU Astro Blog – Day 3
It’s only been 2 and a half days since I’ve arrived at SSP, but it’s felt like three years. The constant shuffle between our cafeteria, and our classrooms in the beating New Mexico heat has felt like a slow, agonizing experience, but I’m starting to grow a little bit of love for SSP in the short time that I’ve been here.
This morning, I had a pretty good breakfast, where I drowned scrambled eggs, sausage, and biscuits in a sea of gravy that tasted a little bit too peppery for my taste, but still enjoyable. The food has started to become a little repetitive, but there’s still a good enough variety of options that makes coming to the student union to eat an exciting experience.
After breakfast, we had our first lecture of the day, where we learned about vector addition, cross product, and dot product, which was difficult, but manageable. Before that, however, I took some time to stop at the statue of a cowboy that rests on a bench on campus, and have a mini photoshoot with the statue. I don’t know if I “mogged” the cowboy, (pronounced ‘moge’ by our professor Dr. A), but I think the photos turned out pretty well.
During lunch, me and some friends decided to try a suggestion our professor Dr. R made, where we add soft serve ice cream and cocoa puffs together. Well, not me, because I find cocoa puffs less than savorable, but from what I heard, it tasted pretty good, so I’ll try it tomorrow.
During our afternoon lecture, we started working with Python in Visual Studio Code. While I never had any experience in Python, I have some experience in other programming languages, so I got up to speed pretty quickly working with coding.
But after dinner, came the dreaded problem sets.
Today, I decided to try and work through the Astronomy and Python problem sets, and lets just say I got humbled pretty quickly, lol. You know how they say that there’s always gonna be someone who’s smarter or better than you at something? I found that out very fast when trying to work through these problems. Even when working with some of my fellow SSP-ers, to say that my experience with SSP so far has been challenging is an understatement, to say the least. Hopefully it gets better though!
My observation group was scheduled to look through the telescope to make observations last night, but because of wildfires throughout the state blowing smoke towards NMSU, the conditions were too windy and dusty to open the observatory dome. We did get to practice using the telescope, however, so our efforts weren’t totally in vain. It did, however, eat into the amount of sleep that I could get.
I’m so glad that I’ve gotten to experience SSP so far and as exhausting as this program can be, I’m confident that it can shape me into a better scientist and person. See you guys tomorrow!