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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

  • [student:] I realized that good astronomers admit their lack of perfect knowledge and remain curious to strengthen their own intuition and identify new issues.
  • Best thing was the collaboration with all involved and the students being more like peers.
  • [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.
  • [The best thing was] Meeting and working with the entire team, seeing the teamwork of the group in action, and being impressed by the talents of the students involved. Also, feeling comfortable with the content and the procedure we will be using to get our data.
  • [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