Tucson is a great place for outdoor activities and I enjoy hiking and running. Mt Lemmon and Saguaro National Park (West) are the most common places I go for hiking/walking. For running, I have been training for marathon since COVID and aiming to break the 3-hour time limit to be qualified for Boston in the near future (my current record is 3h24m, M2B 2024). I also have the long time hobby of drawing and painting (In high school, I have ranked 10/10, the highest level, in sketch and 8/10 in color-painting in some rank examination for amateur artists in China). Sometimes, I also watch anime, sci-fi and play instruments.

I enjoy traveling, especially for nature scenery. Up to now, I have visited around 20 National Parks/Forests in US. For various reasons, somehow I have been to many cold places in winter, including Khabarovsk in Russia, Alaska in US, and Mt Everest Base Camp in Tibet. For the last one, I arrived at the starting point of the mountain path (elevation about 5300 meters, keep on going I might arrive at the peak of Mt. Everest) and slept one night in a guesthouse near the Buddhist temple with the claimed highest elevation on this planet (Rongbuk Monastery). It was so quiet that you could actually hear the trembling sounds of pebbles in the wind echoing among the mountains and the night sky there was so crystal clear and dark with naked-eye magnitude limit around 8!

Back to astronomy, I have been a stargazer around seven. The first telescope I have used was made with paper tubes and plastic lens by myself. Later on my parents bought me some real telescopes and I enjoyed the numerous nights I spent under the night sky. During my childhood in Xining, I did a lot of astronomical sketches and shot Sun/Moon/planets/stars with photographics films. Although a lot of things have changed, I still enjoy amateur astronomy today and drive to some remote, dark places once in a while, to watch the stars and muse about life and the Universe. In addition, I also chase total solar eclipses and have successfully observed four events (2008, 2009, 2017, 2024). Finally, I conduct astrophotography on various topics (see examples below) and have contributed to the famous APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day).