Our first late night observing was followed, naturally, by a late morning. We reported to the hotel lobby around noon and "broke our fast" at Subway, an extremely popular joint. The chaos of ordering and picking up food, however, was somewhat assuaged by the $40(!) Frank gave each of us for spending money while we are here. He is now our favorite person (or mine at least). After some speculation about the evening activity (an opera), we stopped by the hotel to pick up supplies and made it to the classroom to get a "history of asteroids and the Main Belt" and a casual project intro and briefing.
The general idea of the assignment is to get the orbit radius of this asteroid that's in orbit. There's going to be a lot of work involved, from viewing/observing to sketching to math to a final presentation, but it should be really interesting, and with luck the results will be good and our estimations and approximations will all cancel each other out!
This all ended at about three or so, and we had some down time until dinner to catch up on journals, learn more about telescopes and lenses and cameras, and just, in general "space out." (sorry, sorry) The majority of time spent was on taking a photo image with various lenses on the CCD camera - the results were pretty good, if I may say so myself.
Dinner was at an excellent Mexican restaurant called Gabriel's. Corrie told us all that the guacamole was to die for, and she did not mislead us. The waiter there was especially prompt, as well as entertaining - overall the dining experience was very good.
Despite the busy day, after the dinner break everyone was ready to get cultured. We had met up with (the elusive) Galen's family over dinner, and they, along with Corrie's sister, took us to the theater. We went on the scenic route, the main attraction being "Camel Rock," a somewhat self-explainatory landmark in natural geological formations, which was right next to a casino of the same name. Ah, New Mexico…The opera building itself was pretty amazing; it had a roof and seats and a stage (complete with reflecting pool) but no walls. The mountainous wilderness surrounding the theater was the backdrop on the night's opera, The Barber of Seville. We were somewhat confounded by the first half hour or so of the show, as the translation screens provided for every viewer were malfunctioning initially, but the music was beautiful and the lightning show made up for the fact that no one understood what the singers were getting at. During intermission, like the stellar Earthwatch students we are, we stood outside and tried to locate certain landmark constellations, stars, etc. in the night sky. Then back into the theater to see the conclusion of the opera.
I don’t know if anyone managed to stay awake for the entire drive back to the hotel, but by the time we got there, we all were exhausted enough to retire almost immediately.
Dan and Emily work on their journals, though he's not quite as well dressed as her.
