CUB Astro Day 30

I’ll start blog from 12:00 am instead of the morning. So my day started at 12:00am when we had a popsicle party after completing the OD7 code (final code!). It was the one of most relieving moments for me in the program after hours of debugging my super buggy code. Then I went to sleep, but others played hide and seek deep into the after hours with TAs.

After a 7 hour good sleep my day started with the apple I bought from the cafeteria yesterday so that I can skip breakfast and get one hour extra sleep. Then, we headed to SBO (Sommer Bausch Observatory) to complete our MPC report and error analysis. After the MPC report submission we had our lunch and then lectures on relativity and aerospace engineering by our cool TAs (Wenxi & Marcus).

Later, I worked on plate solving and magnitude calculation for our latest observation for 1.5 hours only to find out that our asteroid was out of the frame and it all was for nothing. Although we got a good topic to laugh about.

Then I had my favourite thing (listening to Doctor D talking about random science and history research papers at dinner). After dinner we instantly headed to SBO for a Research team meeting with TAs on coding progress (my code still gets the wrong values 3 places after decimal 🙁

Then we started working on our final OD (orbit determination) report which is due tomorrow (it’s a lot of work). Kenia also drew a cool picture of Marcus and I loved that.

After that I went to sleep in my room while others were still working on their OD report (no compromise with sleep). At night I couldn’t help but think that there are only 4 days left for SSP to end. It’s been one of the most rigorous, immersive and rewarding experiences of my life and now time feels like it’s moving way too fast. I remember in the initial days I was feeling homesick and it felt like I’ve been in SSP for years but now it’s become like a family for me. I think I’ll never meet most of the participants again in my life but I’ll always remember them in my memories. Talking while working on PSets, and coding problems , learning about the whole semester of calculus in 3 hours from Dr. D, going on fun field trips, seeing the Milky way in the middle of nowhere for the first time in my life and learning about stars from Dr. F, learning about python, exoplanets and dark matter from Dr. Z, eating real American Pizza (Thank u Treya) or being a teammate of Amazon’s bestsellers Author.

It’s a small list of many unforgettable experiences SSP gave me, and I feel lucky that I got the chance to experience all of this. I’ll always be grateful for this.

Best Wishes,
Aditya

Aditya

Aditya

SSP Participant