Astro Astro Astro!!

Yesterday's Astro Challenge '05 competition was really funny. We all mugged for hours on ends and discovered that we still didn't know how to answer the MCQ & Data response questions in the quiz. Zhili's expression was the most comical here...ranging from pulling out her hair to shaking her head in frustration.It distracted me but there was hardly anything i know concerning what "summer triangle", "Barnard's Star", age of the universe...blah..blah..blah... so it wasn't any lost. If at all, it gave me the opportunity to glare at her (and her paper) and save what little marks i could muster by copying. =D
After lunch was model building and ala wanted to spray-paint everything in silver, INCLUDING THE FRUITS!! It doesn't help that daryl felt a monotone would totally leave the judges utterly spellbound too. Anyway,so what happened was that we had a silver Mars Rover, with silver cucumber wheels bearing a silver celery-scope, a silver orange amplifier and a copper antannae (the only part that was spared) Again, i doubt that we got much marks for creativity because another 2 groups based their models on the notoriius Mars Rover too... Oh, there were some really bold/daring groups for this segment too... 1 group built an idunnowhat using 4 compact discs on a (is it Star Wars??) box much too small for it. In the end, it looked vaguely like a shiny USS Enterprise. (Maybe all that it resembled was the flat top...) The judging system was way flawed too... they had each team submit 3 votes for the best model/excluding their own. In our pathetic attempt to garner marks, we liasoned with 3 other schs to vote for us.. ha! (thankew zhili!)
There was also a concurrent pyramid game and yyk created something called "the AC way" of answering questions. He would break up parts of the phrase to simpler words to answer. (eg. Christian Hyugen... 1st part: A religion!! or Oort Cloud... 2nd part: you know up there is blue & white. The blue part is the sky, the whte part is??) haha!
We had lunch and dinner in NUS itself and Daryl & i munched on extra grapes that i bought for the model. I dunno where daryl goti t from but he said: "I must have 1 serving of fruits a day. 10 grapes make up 1 serving!" and took that as an excuse for munching up most of my grapes...bah.. Alan and yyk didn't really bother about us because of FFVIII on yyk's com (they played it during almost every break in the competition..haha...) and Zhili went to sit with her BPGHS friends.
Treasure hunt was the last item for ytd and we emerged champs for this section! yay!! Once again, thanks to Zhili...(so pro..) Zhili was also super-enthu during this part, running around for all 15 clues. Daryl & yyk didn't disappoint us too! Esp yyk! Our guide commented that during our rush back to the LT after completing all the clues, he ran even faster than her. =)
Well...although we didn't win anything in the end, i think we really left a mark there. Possibly, astronomy may yet be another competition we can add to our forte. ha! =)