• NASA
  • IPAC

AAS - 2015

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2014 and 2015 NITARP teams attended the 2015 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2014 class was presenting results and the 2015 class was starting up. We had many alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

Quotes

  • [student:] I always knew I was interested in science, but I was always hesitant to say I’d like to pursue it as a career since I simply didn’t know enough about it.[...] the experience was unexpectedly fun and much more exciting and rewarding than I originally anticipated. At the AAS conference, meeting not only professional astronomers but engineers, scientific journalists, and other students made me realize how much astronomy covered and the different types of paths available. Overall, NITARP has made me realize that astronomy is something I definitely want to pursue in my future.
  • For some reason, introductory astronomy textbooks tend not to focus much on SEDs or color-color plots. However, these tools have cropped up in each of my NITARP projects. I imagine this is not a coincidence! I’d like to find a way to introduce these two key concepts in my introductory astronomy course.
  • [student:] All of the astronomers that I met were a lot friendlier than I anticipated.
  • I was very impressed by the students in this context, particularly during the summer meeting at Caltech. In many ways, they were more ready to handle the technical challenges that we faced.
  • [student:] I did not anticipate to have to deal with a lot of software issues over summer. However, it is the unpredictability of the project that makes it so exciting. I decided to take AP computer science this year and learn to code.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015