UNC Astro Blog – Day 20

Hi! 

I’m Andy, and today was a pretty relaxing weekend at SSP compared to the weekdays. We just got back from the Durham Bulls game yesterday which was a nice refresher from the daily problem set routines and was the 1st professional baseball game I’ve attended in a while. Even though it’s Saturday, we still had to get up pretty early for a lecture so a lot of people were struggling to stay awake. However, I really enjoyed getting to actually learn how Gauss was able to accurately determine orbits even though the substitutes were really really really ugly. It made a few of us wonder if this guy had a life.

Jokes aside, it’s really satisfying to see how all the ideas we’ve learned are coming together (other than the cs parts) to help us determine the orbit of our asteroid. Getting to submit our magnitude measurements to the Minor Planet Center is also quite exciting!

In the afternoon, a few of us went to play Tennis in the heat which gave us an excuse to spend more money on the acai bowls on Franklin Street. It’s definitely worth it though and if you haven’t tried it you definitely should.

Other than that, we followed our daily routines of dressing up and going to dinner, and then completing the problem sets at night at Philip’s Hall. Honestly, I’m getting a bit tired now but I hope you got a glimpse of the typical weekend here at SSP (UNC)!

– Andy