Jonathon Bruce

First off this place has no trees and the tea isn’t sweet! There is no humidity, so I’m enjoying that. My arrival was kinda funny because I was five hours late, when walked out of the gate, everyone was looking for me. The night sky is beautiful; I’ve never seen a sky so clear! Down to business. The first observing session was cloudy, meaning that the telescopes weren’t able to be used; however, we did get a chance to set up the telescope, so at least we’ll know what to do next time we go out there.

This is what we saw in between clouds. The top bright star is Vega, which is all I know about this picture. Currently why in the world planets travel retrograde, and if asteroids do the same.

6/20

When we woke up at one o’clock we heard a lecture on space weather, solar winds, and the northern lights. After the talk we ate at this wicked restaurant called Central Avenue Grill! It’s the fanciest place I’ve been to and I wore an undershirt. Then that night we aligned the telescopes and began the process of locating the asteroid 532 Herculina. It took the team two hours to find it because we’re astrnomically challenged. Tonight it should go smoother, our objective is to find where we were and track where the asteroid has moved.

 6/21

I finally ate food like back home! Funny enough, the name of this place was Bob's Bodacious BBQ!! They were the best ribs I've ever had! After the culinary experience, we attended a lecture on time, calendars, and retrograde motion. That night, Sam and me found 532 Herculina with no problem! After finding the asteroid and tracking for a couple of hours, we decided to find the asteroid 10 Hygiea. We also looked at messier object 51, which are 2 colliding galaxies. We left Fenton hill at about 3:00 am and played rummy for a while.

 6/22

Today we ate Thai food and were almost late to the lecture on Neutrinos, Which was almost completely over our heads! Just for the record, it's really cool that something can fly through your head and not kill you. We actually played Frisbee in the light, but since we were in public place, bystanders turned out to be in grave danger! We almost took out a guy in a wheelchair! Oh yeah, a three-year-old can throw a Frisbee better than me!

6/23

We didn't go observing last night because we had geology tour this morning'. Ryan, Sam, and me tested our rock climbing skills at Soda Dam. It turns out that Geology is a lot of fun! We ate lunch in a BAR!!!!!!! AND Ryan wouldn't keep his dirty socks off the table! The best part of the day was when we saw The Fast and The Furious :Tokyo Drift!

 6/24

After we woke up the next day, we did our laundry. While it was going, we learned how to play hot box with a Frisbee. We attended a social at Don's that night. We watched Contact and played Charades, which was interesting to say the least! Afterwards we visited the pool area and competed for our spots. Amy won a couple of times.

6/25

Today, we woke up and attended a lecture at Canyon School. Later, we went to Bandelier National Park and visited the Native American Archaeological sites, which were awesome! It's amazing that some of the original Indian Art still survives. On our way back down it started to rain, which was no big deal. We ate at the Hilltop Diner ad surprised Joe with an off key birthday surprise. After we finished eating we saw a motorcycle with a V-8 in it. The guy said that it would go from 40-120mph in 3 seconds.

6/26

Today we saw an opera! We stopped at Scott's house and slowly remembered how play pool and ate some really good food that Scott's Girlfriend made. Shortly after we ate, we departed for the opera. (in the rain) It was in French, but we had translators, so it was okay. I caught Gar nodding off twice! After she swore not to go to sleep because it was rude; however, she did a lot better than Joe who laid down in between the rows and started snoring!

6/28

Yesterday we visited the VLA, which means Very Large Array. The VLA is a collection of radio telescopes that uses radio waves to detect anything not of this atmosphere. There are 27 telescopes total that can move into four different configurations. The lab is about to switch over from 30-year-old software to new Fiber optic software by 2007.

 6/29

We're beginning to put our presentation together for Friday. To get specific, we casting out whom will do which part. Joe propped his le above his head for three hours and immediately tried to stand on it, causing him to fall flat on his booty!!!!

6/30

Now we're trying to get he macs to work (which didn't), we abandoned them and started to use Scott's laptop. The dry run wen well, but we're having another in an hour. I'm kinda worried.

7/1

The presentation went very well, ryan performed better than any of his practice runs, and we got a standing ovation and lots of interesting questions. Today we had our radio talk and visited milagro, the neutrino catching gov't place. We're gonna go skating again shortly and we leave tomorrow! I'm gonna stay up all night so I don't miss anything.