This semester Chase and I took a stellar astronomy class. That being said, the class was less than stellar...it was actually pretty boring and I am positive that the professor didn't like me. He picked on me a lot for little things, made notes on my work about how I did such and such wrong (when we all did the exact same thing!), and still didn't remember my name on the last day of class. The actual astronomy part was pretty interesting, though! It is always fascinating to learn about something new, especially such a vast topic as astronomy. One of the first things we were assigned to complete was a star chart. We had to choose a constellation (Cassiopeia) and measure the degrees of each star in it, and also measure the distance to Polaris (the north star). Since you can't see but 3 or 4 stars in Austin, Chase and I decided to drive out to Enchanted Rock, camp out for the night, and make our observations.
This was a somewhat spur of the moment decision. Note to self: do not go camping at Enchanted Rock unless you are completely prepared. So our first mistake was not checking to see if we could drive up to the campsites. For some dumb reason we just assumed that we could. WRONG. You have to hike for about a mile and a half before you reach the primitive campsites, hence the word "primitive". So after making the drive out there, paying for the campsite, and realizing that we would have to walk all the way there in the Texas heat, we also realized that we forgot a tent. Yes, I know, how could we forget a tent right? Surprisingly it was easy to do. With nothing else to do, we loaded up as much as we could carry and started the walk. Now, picture this: we have on these huge backpacks stuffed to the brim, Chase is carrying a nice size cooler, I have his giant laptop in my backpack, and somehow he fit the sleeping bag into his. I swear we had to stop every five minutes from exhaustion. Once we finally made it to the campsite and it got dark, we decided that it was way to creepy to stay there. We were under these scary trees, all alone, and it just looked like a scene out of a horror movie. And then just to add to the creepiness, we could hear so many coyotes and they seemed way to close for comfort. We finally decided to move our campsite to a more open location. We needed to be able to see the sky anyway! We decided on a slab of granite...which are everywhere, since Enchanted Rock is in fact just a big granite mound. So we laid everything out and started our observations. As our flashlight broke, phones died, and water bottles ran out, we finished up the observations and decided to hike back to the truck before it got hot, since we were out of water.
In the end, we got our star charts made. Of course I got a B because my paper was "sloppy". Pshh. I am not a sloppy person, at least not when it comes to school assignments. Anyways! Next time we go to Enchanted Rock, we are going to be much better prepared.
At least I can mark it off my list! :D
Bien รก vous,
Caitlin
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