Sunday, July 3, 2022
By:
I’m authorized to work at NASA for the rest of the summer! On Monday, I got a call from NASA internship coordinator, Sarah Alspaw, who asked me to confirm some things before I could go in. The next day, I met Eric at NASA for a more in-depth tour of the buildings that I’d be working in. He showed me my office (down the hall from his), and I worked there for the rest of the day. Working on site has helped me get a lot more done. Some highlights from this week include getting astrometry.net to work as a python program, using a jupyter notebook and a remote SSH to tunnel into the flight computer, and presenting my work with astrometry.net to the EXCLAIM collaboration. Next week I’m going to start developing a jupyter notebook interface for the star camera through the ssh tunnel, remove the redis dependency in the python astrometry program, and design the star camera mount. I’m looking forward to work next week - my daily commute time is now 3.5 hours, so I can start working through my long list of tv shows to watch.
Outside of work, I’ve gotten to play frisbee with the group at NASA and with Taylor O’s friends! The NASA group plays on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I only played on Thursday but they were amazing. Usually when I play co-ed pickup, it is mostly men and they don’t throw to me. But this group threw to me as much as the other players and I scored a lot! Taylor’s group was similar. We played on Saturday morning with a larger group in Virginia, and they included us in the game just as much as everyone else. I’m hoping to play with both groups again next week.
I saw my cousin Alex, who recently graduated from college and moved to DC two weeks after I got here. We got dinner at a ramen house called Daikaya the Izakaya in Chinatown, and it was so good that I went back on Friday with my college friend Emma. We also tried the soft-serve ice cream from a shop across the street called Little Sesame. They had two flavors: vanilla-tahini and chocolate-coffee, with a choice of cacao nibs, crumbled sesame cookies, and pistachio bits for toppings.
The interns also started playing Dungeons and Dragons. Our first session was on Thursday evening, and Taylor C was our dungeon master! I have never played before but it was a lot of fun. Taylor C, Justin, Ben, and Valeria seem to have played before. During our session, we killed two t-rex dudes who attacked our tavern (and destroyed the tavern in the fight). Justin convinced a shopkeeper to sell his carriage to us, and he became very very good friends with the innkeeper and stayed in a private room in the inn ;) the rest of us slept in our bedrolls outside. Next time we will visit the city and fly to another planet on the Sky Bus.
Nicole Leung