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Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The Cold Spotz team came to visit in June 2012. The core team educators plus 8 students attended.

Quotes

  • I was a little nervous initially about working with people I had never met before, but it turned out to be so much better than I could have expected.
  • [This experience] showed me that astronomy is much more than looking at the sky. It is using formulas and images to figure just exactly what is out there in our universe.
  • I did not expect to use the internet as much as we did.
  • I had anticipated the stress and frustration of trying to push the students and data further than we had before. While I felt our students were well prepared, there was a lot of information which we needed to digest and incorporate into our workflow, and young students are not always that quick on their feet when it comes to complicated procedures or conceptual reasoning. However, I felt the students did great and the challenge was appropriate.
  • Real astronomy is searching the sky and knowing we are not the center of the universe. That there is so much more out there than just stars and rocks.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz