• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA

Our regular summer visit to Caltech was hijacked by COVID-19. So we did an online work week instead -- 4 days when all the participants on the team come together to work intensively on the data. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

OIRMA worked July 5-9, 2020. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.


Quotes

  • [It's important for astronomers to have:] Curiosity. Patience. Tenacity. Ability to collaborate fruitfully. Willingness to ask for help. Willingness to work hard on something that may not turn out.
  • I was super impressed with the uniformity of effort and contribution from both educators and students. I think seeing this meant a lot to the students.
  • I understood that Astronomy is data driven, but working through this data analysis just enhanced my understand and the scope of this. I also understand better the challenges that Astronomers have in determining what data is needed and being able to access that data.
  • [...]one of NITARP’s superpowers: the way that research work can reshape the relationship between students and teachers from a hierarchical one to something more collaborative.
  • [student:] Real astronomy is not the enhanced pictures that ordinary people are used to seeing in the news or on the internet, instead it is data. It’s knowing how to manipulate this data to understand what it truly means. It is extracting from these numbers the structure of something that we can barely even see. In essence, astronomy is the ingenuity to turn something that is invisible into something visible. Something that I expected to be a part of scientific research was accessing the data and creating the light curves. Something that I did not expect to be a part of authentic research was the flexibility that was needed to obtain the data that you need.

Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA