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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:] All of the astronomers that I met were a lot friendlier than I anticipated.
  • NITARP has greatly changed the way I view my astronomy course. Since I have participated in NITARP, my astronomy course has become much more focused on the “how do we know what we know about stars” and my students spend quite a bit of time in class analyzing spectra, doing photometry and estimating distances through the use of real data. While the “real” research opportunity through NITARP is left as an after school club activity, all of my students have benefited from my involvement in NITARP.
  • In both of my NITARP experiences, we have run into major difficulties that triggered a complete reworking of the project. At this point, I think I would expect things not to go as planned on a given science project. This is not a bad thing -- it is just the way things tend to go. We did reach a nice result in both cases, but there were some bumps along the way.
  • [student:] There was a high school event at AAS, I think it was for local high school students who were interested in astronomy. We were planning to go to it but then we found out it was really kid stuff. It was for people on the outside, and we realized that we’re on the inside now, even though we only know a tiny bit.
  • The thing that most surprised me [...], was how objective astronomers was in their conversations. Conversations with scientists are all about data, learning about a system, and objectively trying to determine an answer. It can seem like they are stepping on toes, or even being rude, but once you realize that they are just trying to uncover an answer or ferret out an idea, and then it is no big deal.

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AAS - 2015