TOASTI 14 Phase 1 Week 1

Spoiler: This might be one hell long of a post so sit back relax and probably have some popcorn

I'm gonna talk a bit about my excruciating, 1-month-long journey to be someone who is capable enough to represent Indonesia in the International Olympiad of Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) or International Astronomy Olympiad (IAO) of 2014 phase 1.

So it all started on the 27th of October,Sunday when i arrived in Bandung after returning home from there on the 8th of September for the nationals.However, unlike before, i was alone. Yup, there i was, coming to my home for the next 1 month alone without anyone familiar.

Since i was not very comfortable at first, automatically i wanted to look for a friend...Elsa, who moved to Bandung not so long ago. I missed her to be honest. She was the gatekeeper to my success in Astronomy since she joined the team first before i did, but she joined merely because she loved astronomy. Anyway, I spent my sunday with her, talking about our new life, having lunch together, drinking some coffee and all, and more importantly, gossip ( i know it's weird for a boy to gossip (P.S. I'm straight) but sometimes it's fun to do it with your friend) but we didnt gossip about boys and all.... we just talked about this particular girl and this particular guy at her new school or at our school. And yeah, it was one crazy Sunday because i never thought that i would have so much fun just by talking all day long.

Afterwards, i got back to my room. I was surprised to find one of my roommate is the first rank in the Nationals, then i thought "Yeah putting the first and the second rank is like totally the best idea ever since they could be best friends and get close to one another" (hope that this does not happen in the second one). Then i spent my the rest of the day like a stranger.

Then, the next day we had an opening lecture which was not actually that important but to be honest, it was quite interesting and i could get to know more people.In the evening, we had a pretest which had a question that i had never known (like every question i had done in this circumstance). And the rest of the week was spent in an ordinary way since most of the lectures are about reviewing things. Not many things happen. I got to know them bit by bit and all. So it was quite fun actually joining this kind of event (despite the fact that i have to catch up with the lesson when i got back)

Oh yeah, on Friday we went to the Bosscha Observatory ( the only one in South East Asia) and we got to look at a really big telescope, the Zeiss telescope  and other smaller telescope like the Surya (Solar ) Observatory, GAO-ITB, Schmidt Bima Sakti(Milky Way)

Zeiss

And we had a test after the tour to write down everything you remember about the instruments.I ignored the specs and focus more on the history so yeah everything i wrote down on that time is like a history book with barely any numbers.Then there was also a task to write down 88 constellations which i expected to happen so i managed to get every single one but i guess i wrote some mistakenly like (Equuleus --> Equules,etc)

Then there was a practical test to assemble telescope which i should've been able to do since i the telescope used (Celestron) is quite similar to the one in my school (Skywatcher) but i guess coming there made me uncomfortable and i didnt manage to assemble everything properly (there are some parts that are assembled beforehand) in the given time (10 minutes) although i had ever assemble Skywatcher in about 5 minutes completely. So yeah the whole week went by with me getting nervous all the time even though i know i was not supposed to.