Amy Broome

New Mexico, in great contrast to Vermont, is almost entirely flat, is completely dry, very red, and warm all the time. Having been here only a few days, I haven't seen many trees, I believe that there are mostly just shrubs and bushes. I specifically would like to see a tumbleweed while I am here, and I have yet to do so.

Before coming to New Mexico, I was nervous about flying on my own, and navigating my way through airports. I was also anxious to meet the other participants. Upon my somewhat tardy arrival, and apparent lack of observation, I found the Earthwatch group. I'm not sure what exactly I had expected, but I was entirely pleased with what I had found. It turns out that I was able to be outgoing from the beginning, and that everybody in the group is really cool. We had inside jokes within hours, something I had not imagined happening for at least days.

6/19: We attended a few talks and lectures, and learned more about the Los Alamos National Laboratory. We had our first observing session, and though the sky never fully cleared, we were able to set up the telescopes, and observe the sky by naked eye. The New Mexico sky is much more open than that of Vermont, so there is much more to look at. We got to see Jupiter, to our north, and we also saw Ursa Major, Vega, and Regulus.

6/20: Today I had Chinese food for breakfast for the first time, provided that our breakfast was at 1:00! We also attended a talk on Northern Lights, Solar Winds, and Space Storms, delivered by Geoff Reeves. Soon after, we traveled to the Fenton Hill Observatory to begin our asteroid location and tracking project. It was much colder, and we were out much later, but it was also worth the while. It took some time to align our stars, but all in all, it went rather smoothly until we began to search for our asteroid.

            Sam, Jon, Ryan, and myself were together in a group, and we decided to use Antares and Vega for our alignment stars. We then viewed many Messier objects, stars and planets. We viewed Jupiter, on which we could see the red bands, and also four of its moons. Albireo is a wicked cool star, because it is a double star, one of which is gold, and the other blue. We also viewed the ring nebula, and M17, Mercury, Venus, Mars, the moon, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and we may have seen Pluto, but then again, we had no definite evidence of having done so.

            The asteroid took forever to locate, and in the end we had to star hop from a bright star, Serpens Omicron, over several telescope views until we were able to locate what we thought to be our asteroid. Almost two hours later, we returned to view again, and we confirmed that our asteroid had moved. Back at the hotel, we played Black Jack, and although I had a 21 hand, I ended up having to do the 50 push-ups that I had bet to begin with.

         6/21/06: Today we were supposed to wake up a 1:00, but my roommate Gar and I woke up at 10:00 and went to the grocery store. We came back for just an hour of sleep before waking up and heading out to Bob's Bodacious BBQ, where I was conquered by a chicken sandwich. We then reviewed our findings from our asteroid location and tracking, and learned more about time in relation to astronomy. For an awesome social event, our crew went roller-skating, something that I was almost certain that I would fail at. It turns out that I wasn't all that awful, although I fell a few times, and have lost a considerable amount of skin from my knees. We played some couple really great games of tag, and afterwards I showed everybody how to leg wrestle! and I won a few times! It was also lots of fun to play around on the small playground outside. Afterwards, we traveled to the Fenton Hill Observatory, where we were able to set up much more quickly, and my group of Caitlin, Ryan, and myself, was able to align our stars quickly with precision. It went so well, that we were able to head straight to the previous coordinates of the asteroid, and have it in our field of view first thing. It took us a while from there to center and identify the new centered asteroid, but all in all, it went smoothly and efficiently. We returned to the telescope an hour later to find that the asteroid had indeed moved. We departed Fenton Hill around 3:00 A.M., and stayed up for quite some time. Gar and I did not retire to sleep until about 8:00am. pretty early huh?

6/22/06: Today was our first day of playing Ultimate Frisbee in the light, at the park after lunch. We almost hit a couple people, but fortunately nobody got too upset. We also went to the Black Hole for the first time- that store has tons upon tons of things. I had my first meal of Thai food, and we were almost late for our lecture on neutrinos, that apparently was a bit over the heads of the entire audience.

6/23/06: Today my roommate and I slept in - we were supposed to be up and ready and downstairs by 8:15; we woke up at 8:15. We set out on a geology tour, the best part was at Soda Dam, where there were a few hot springs, and some really cool travertine rock formation. Caitlin and I had an awesome time exploring and climbing up and down the rock face, and we got a group picture of us in a cave type thing. We ate lunch at a really awesome place that really felt like New Mexico, and had wicked yummy food. it was a problem that we couldn't play pool in the bar because none of us are 21. Afterwards, we headed to the Black Hole, and Caitlin, Gar, and I bought tons of patches. We then went to play Frisbee at the park, and I almost lost my disc in the pond. This time however, we didn't almost hit anybody. We ate at Quizno's quickly, and then played more Frisbee before heading off to the Bradbury Museum to hear Frank's talk on supernovae. We then went to get some ice cream, upon finishing our ice cream we set off to the movie theatre, running most of the way. We saw The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which proved to be a pretty exciting movie. We then chilled (somewhat literally) at the park, and came back to the hotel a bit past midnight, watched TV and laughed at Jon almost blowing up the hotel room.

6/24/06: Today we had breakfast in the lobby, the best were definitely the Rice Crispies. We then came over to the Canyon school to learn more about our asteroid data, and learn how accurate our solutions had turned out to be. We did our laundry today at the Laundromat across from a soccer field, and while we waited for our clothes to wash and dry, I taught everybody how to play Hot Box, a simpler version of Ultimate Frisbee. We ended up factoring in the slant of the asteroid's orbit, which gave us a much closer answer than we had at first. That evening, we went to Don's house for a social. At Don's house we played an awfully amazing and embarrassing game of charades, and watched the movie "Contact". We all had tons of fun, and then went swimming at the pool. We all had a competition in the pool to hold our spots next to the warm air jets! I think I won a bit against Jon and Sam.

6/25/06: We left today for Bandelier National Park, and had an awesome time there. There were some wicked cool caves that we could climb up into, and we all crammed into a couple for some group pictures. It was overcast for the entire day, but it never really rained hard, so we were able to hike comfortably and have tons of fun. At one part, there was a 140 foot vertical ascension to another set of caves. On the way back, at huge tree branch landed on Joe's shoulders, and he carried at all the way back through the trails as if it were a pet snake. We all went out to eat and had the wait-staff sing happy birthday for Joe's 18^th birthday. We went observing to begin our Messier marathon, and we viewed a sizeable number of Messier objects, and took another look at our asteroid, 532 Herculina.

6/26/06: We traveled to Santa Fe today, and went shopping around for about an hour. We also headed out to Scott's house and had some exquisite lasagna. We also played pool, and I played a few games much better than I have ever played before! We then headed back to Santa Fe to see the opera "Carmen", where it was rather chilly and where I, and several others, couldn't keep our eyes open.

6/27/06: We left bright and early for a tour of the VLA in Socorro, a 3-4 hour ride, and we got to climb up into one of the temporarily inactive telescopes. I saw a TUMBLEWEED, even though it was a bit small. VLA means Very Large Array, and they are a compilation of 27 radio telescopes that detect radio waves from our universe. The telescopes work in pairs and can be used in different arrangements to collectively form holistic images of the collected data. We returned to Santa Fe for dinner, and arrived back at home around 10:00. We went to Smith's and loaded up on sugar. That was just me actually, and went back to the room to watch cops and family guy. Gar and I stayed up until 4:00.

6/28/06: We woke up for breakfast at 9:15. We made a breakfast for Joe and Sam, but Joe is apparently to picky to eat food, so Sam ate it all. We are now working on our Bradbury presentation for Friday, and catching up on blogs and such. We played pool during lunch, and worked more on our presentation. At 6:30, Rob Coker delivered a lecture on black holes. We went observing, and tried to distinguish binary stars of certain distances.

6/29/06: We dedicated the majority of our entire day to developing our Bradbury presentation, and we stayed at the Canyon school until 11:00 PM. Afterwards, we went to my hotel room to work on it more, and hopefully relax while doing so. It was great to watch Family Guy at 12:30. Hahaha.

6/30/06: Yet another day of prep for our presentation. We've had one run-through thus far, and are expecting another in about an hour. Hopefully everything will come together in the right way, because our presentation is at 6:30. Oh, and I found out that they actually do sell Fun Dip in New Mexico, and I bought and ate two of them. To think that they were sitting in the gas station right beside our hotel and I didn't know it until today. Our presentation went rather well! I forgot to say one of the things I was going to mention, but it wasn't noticeable, and I didn't stumble on anything. We worked very well together, and felt accomplished, even though the old guy that is always at the presentations wasn't there. We went to Smith's parking lot and played Frisbee for a bit before walking to the park.

7/1/06: Today is the last day. Gar and I woke up and brought Jon and Sam to breakfast at McDonald's this morning, and then the whole crew headed out to Fenton Hill in order to do our Amateur Radio Special Event. We contacted people from many different states, including California, New Jersey, Massachussetts, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, New York, and Alabama. We walked over to the Milagro, a high-energy cosmic ray telescope that holds 5 million gallons of water. Crazy. Next we went to a store, and I got some yummy chocolate-covered coffee beans, and now we are blogging. We are going to go roller-skating later on and we are also going to eat in White Rock, and paint on a rock. Our plan is to stay up all night, as we are leaving so early (4:00 AM) the next day. I can tell already that it is going to be sad saying bye to everybody, and I know that we'll all miss our time here. It has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and I couldn't have asked for a better group of people to have here with me. THANKS!