Linfield University Astrophysics Day 19: The Eve Before My Independence
The characters and events portrayed in this production are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental -Sun Tzu, Art of War
HAPPY FRIYAY!!!!
I woke up to the sound of my “Presto” alarm (best ringtone) at 6:45 AM and quickly put on my socks and shoes for a morning run. I was a lot more consistent on the daily morning runs in the first week or so but after my famous calf injury (iykyk), I go every other day or so but today, my calf was healing and I was ready to get back into the runs because as the one and only says, “my whole life is consistent.”
We ran a quick two miles then stretched and cooled down. Also, I’m 99% sure I spread my calf injury to Alec because I heard him heavily complaining about his calves afterward :O
Afterwards, I showered and headed to lecture at 8:32 (woke up at 6:45 and still couldn’t make it to breakfast smh) soooooooooooooooooo I was late.
For the lecture today we FINALLY learned about the BIG and bad Method of Gauss. This was how we were actually going to determine the six orbital elements of our asteroid. I felt like I was absorbing the content and was able to keep up for this lecture which is NOT common for me and a bunch of others. I was also able to stay awake for the entire lesson and I am very proud of that achievement. This one is for the records.
After our first of many lectures on Method of Gauss, we had lunchtime! We chowed down on some chicken tenders and fries. This lunch was actually really good compared to some of the other lunches. Side note, an interesting trend I noticed is that the lunch is consistently MUCH better than the dinners for whatever reason.
Then, we moved onto the big Dr. T’s lecture which was about writing clean code. Afterwards, we moved onto a coding exercise where we had to take a faulty code file that attempted to simulate an asteroid’s orbit and debug it and make the code cleaner.
Once we finished our coding exercise, it was now work time before dinner. Today, our work time before dinner began surprisingly early at 2:30 where it usually ends at 3:30. So I decided to work through the Orbit Determination coding assignment that was essentially finding angular momentum from position and velocity vectors. Although the code assignment was pretty easy, it still took me a while to complete because of some random errors that I didn’t really understand. I also kept getting distracted by random things (even ended up filming a tiktok for a beatbox rap…)
After our work sesh, we headed back to the dorms to get ready for dinner and in the words of our prince charming TA, Zackarius:
NO PHONES AT DINNER!
Sooooooo I don’t have any pics from there but we had chicken, potatoes, and asparagus so it was good?
Also my table had some pretty interesting conversations thanks to our rambunctious TA Ben bringing up some niche conversation topics that I don’t really remember since I’m writing this blog two days after.
After dinner, me, Aarav, and Massi headed straight to the fountain. Aarav and I had a mission. We’d been trying to hit this particular pose (the flag pose) for days now and we couldn’t get it. But on the day that I had my blog, I knew that we had to try once more for the blog and we hit it. yippee.
Now it was lock in time. Our group had to finish the entire methodology section for our research paper AND we had observations tonight. We had a debriefing at 8:30pm for observations and we were first shift so that meant we had to set up the telescope so we had to LOCK IN for the methodology section if we wanted to finish it properly. It was 7:30 and we needed to get words on the page NOW. We didn’t end up working on it before 8:30.
At 8:30, Dr. T ran us through how the second observation round for the telescopes was going to go. Essentially, the first group was going to set up the telescope (set up the telescope physically, align the finder scope and the actual telescope, and connect the camera to our observing laptop). Last observing session, we were on the second shift so this was our first time actually setting up the telescope together as a group (if you don’t count the test run at the very beginning of the program). There are two telescopes so two groups go at a time and there are also two different shifts, so on a day, four groups get to observe. After both groups for a particular telescope finished observing, you would then do deep sky object (DSO) observations together. Last time, our telescope session ended at 2:30am (and I slept at around 4) so I was NOT trying to stay up that late and hoped it would end earlier.
Once we began, it was tough. We had no problem setting up the physical components of the telescope, but aligning the finder scope and the telescope was hard. We first tried to point the telescope at a small grey box on a far away building but a tree branch got in the way and we couldn’t really get it to work (I even tried to take the branch out with my epic taekwondo skills but it still didn’t work). Then, we switched to a yellow sign and we eventually got it to work with the power of our amazing group (The Three Little Piglins takeover).
But thanks to this setback, we were running behind the other group. We then had to align the telescope to Arcturus (in the north) and Vega (in the south) which went relatively smooth aside from the fact that Dr. R told us that our alignment of the finder scope and the telescope was kinda off so we had to redo that. Dr. R made us refocus the telescope and it was really cool watching the big donut shape of Arcturus converge into a singular bright star (we also lowered another knob to make the background stars more visible, don’t really remember exactly what it was [TA note: I think there’s only the focus knob but maybe they upped the gain]).
At this point, we were like 10 minutes behind the other group and 30 minutes off schedule so everyone was kinda stressed. We connected the telescope to the computer and got to work. We went on DS9 and generated a finder chart of our asteroid and did our best to align the telescope with the Declination and Right Ascension of our asteroid.
By now, we were REALLY struggling to locate our asteroid so our legendary TA Zackarius came over and helped us out.
But Zack was also struggling so we were all extremely confused, tired, cold, and stressed. It was 11:30 and in the words of Dr. T, we were EATING into the other group’s observation time. Then, Dr. T came over like an angel from heaven, sat down, and found our asteroid within 2 minutes.
As it turned out, we were staring at it for 30 minutes but none of us realized. We just thought it was a really bright star that wasn’t visible on our finder chart for some weird reason.
After we took our frames, we went back inside to wait for the second session to finish and just chilled out.
BUT WAIT!
We still have to finish our methodology section. I bet you forgot that. So with 30 minutes left and a dream, we got to work on it. Luckily, we made a lot of progress last night on it so we didn’t have much to do and we were able to finish semi comfortably.
At around 11:55, we got called back outside since the second shift had finished their observations and it was time for our two groups to work on the DSO observations together.
Once we began, it was a lot more relaxed since the process was purely monotonous and since only three people were actively working on the DSO observation, the other three were just watching (or just having fun).
Our two groups worked on identifying the Eagle Nebula (fitting for July 4th) and the other two groups worked on the Dumbbell Nebula. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture of when we identified the Eagle Nebula but I got a picture of the other group’s Dumbbell Nebula.
While we were enjoying the sights of the Dumbbell Nebula, something happened. The winds changed directions, the night sky grew darker, and the surrounding trees groaned. The grassy terrain began to vibrate, sending dead leaves dancing over the frost-bitten soil. A suffocating pressure clamped down on all four groups, squeezing the warm air of our lungs.
The police pulled up.
More specifically, campus security, but they were very chill and they were just interested in our observations. We showed them the Dumbbell Nebula picture that we got and they were pleased. I even got a tuff flick with them.
And after that, nothing much happened. BUT THEN, we all realized it was July 4th and our inner American emerged so we all sang the national anthem in unison.
Just a quick reflection but the days go by so fast, it’s genuinely crazy. The first two days went by so slow. But now, we got into a rhythm and the days just blend together. Regardless, it’s a lot of fun but I wish this experience would go by just a bit slower.
And that’s my blog. Bye.
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Saathvik V.
SSP Participant
What’s up! My name is Saathvik and I am a rising senior from Round Rock High School. In my free time, I enjoy drawing and writing poetry. I’ve really enjoyed my time here so far and am super duper excited for these last 2 weeks!
