Notre Dame Supplement Essay on project during high school

Please help me with this! It's supposed to tell about an academic pursuit I have made during high school.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the stars. I remember spending summer nights lying on my lawn just gazing into the cosmos. Looking up at the sky is like looking into a secret world. It is unknown yet so fascinating. The feeling I would get when looking up at the night sky on those summer nights was one of exhilaration and amazement at what God had created. I wanted to learn all I could about the stars, planets, and everything in between. In high school I was given an opportunity to pursue my dream.

When I attended my freshmen orientation, I learned that an Astronomy class was available through an online course. Needless to say, I immediately signed up for it. The class taught me the basics of every aspect of astronomy. To perform lab reports for the class, we were introduced to the Harvard MicroObservatory Online Telescope. The final project for this class was a challenge to use that online telescope to research a topic of your choice and then publish your results on the Harvard website.

The telescope basically just takes pictures of wherever you set its coordinates to, but with these pictures the amount of things one can discover is limitless. For my project I decided to determine the distance to the stars. I chose this because on all those nights spent looking at the stars I knew they were far away, but I had no idea what the actual distance was. At first it seemed like a daunting task. After all, how can you determine the distance to something in outer space just from a picture? The trick is to determine the brightness of the object and compare it to something you know the distance to. In my case, this was the sun. After using the inverse-square law and a computer program that calculates the brightness in flux units, I discovered the distance to various stars ranging from ones in our own galaxy to ones that are so far away that we are viewing them as they were millions of years ago.

This project has inspired me because it has shown me how things that may seem impossible or unreachable can be met and overcome. All of it could not have been achieved, however, without the resources I was given access to in the class. At Notre Dame I know I will have access to many other great research opportunities like this rare one I was given in high school.

This is such a strong, thoughtful essay; it seems to have everything. It catches my attention at the start, and the topic is a good one.

Here is a place, though, where the paragraph does not begin with a topic sentence that tells the main idea of the paragraph:
The telescope basically just takes pictures of wherever you set its coordinates to, but with these pictures the amount of things one can discover is limitless. For my project I decided to determine the distance ... In this paragraph, it would be good to use a topic sentence that tells the main idea of the paragraph. Maybe if you switch the order of these two sentences above, it would be better, because the sentence about your project determining the distance could be a good topic sentence.

Another possible way to make it even more impressive would be to figure out a skill or insight you gained (doing this project) that will also help you in your chosen field of study.

:-)