AAS - 2024

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 2023 and 2024 NITARP teams attended the 2024 January AAS meeting in New Orleans, LA. The 2023 class was presenting results and the 2024 class was starting up. We had alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the press release on NITARP from the AAS, and the special online article about NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here. (In addition to the iPoster sessions as listed here, the physical versions of the 2023 teams' posters were up at the IPAC booth all day Tuesday.)

2023 teams:

171.01 McKay et al., Young stellar students and objects: Illuminating astronomy research for students and teachers (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.02 Hickey et al., Building Confidence and Combating Imposter Syndrome Through Student-Educator Research Projects (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.05 Garcia et al., Reaching for the Stars: How Research Experience Has Expanded the Scope of a High School Astronomy Club (Monday 5:30-6:30)
181.01 Kuper et al., Looking for Young Stellar Objects in Obscure Sharpless Regions (Monday 5:30-6:30)
201.05 Carpenetti et al., Building a Catalog of AGN with Erroneous Parallaxes Using WISE and Gaia (Tuesday 9-10)

Alumni:

167.01 Sperling et al., Student-Led High Altitude Ballooning into Solar Eclipses (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.03 Rebull et al., NITARP Lesson Plans: Bite-Size Pieces of Authentic Science Research Experiences (Monday 5:30-6:30)
171.06 Newland, Using Google Colab to Teach Hubble-Lemaitre's Law with BOSS Data (Monday 5:30-6:30)
176.02 Rebull et al., Young Stellar Object Candidates in IC 417 (Monday 5:30-6:30)
203.03 Wojciak et al., Exploring Color-Magnitude Relationships Among Quasars with z between 1.5-1.75 (Tuesday 9-10)
458.21 Jones & Rutherford, The Three-Dimensional Structure of IC 2391 (Thursday 1-2)

Quotes

[Now, in my classroom,] I really push my students to collect authentic data and we have been practicing our presentation skills a lot more. I also use the charts and graphs during our astronomy unit and talk about the experience with my students.
One of my great epiphanies for the year was that it's okay to not be the smartest one in the room. What's not okay is to stop trying to figure out the problem.
NITARP has opened my eyes and made me more aware. It’s made me more aware of the larger community of scientists and educators that work together and learn from each other, and I’m grateful to be in that community now. It’s made me more aware of opportunities and possibilities: programs and achievements that I didn’t know I was able to do or even capable of doing, and I hope to do more in the future. And lastly, it made me more aware of curriculum resources out there: content, techniques, and specific activities, and I plan on incorporating them into my classroom.
I was surprised that we actually got a real research topic that was of consequence and was a real “fishing expedition.” This not how most teachers in research opportunities turn out.
[student]: Personally, the most interesting thing I did over the whole year was being able to interact with real astronomers and get to see exactly what their career is like. I found it very interesting because I’ve thought about working in astronomy for a while.

AAS - 2024

Quotes

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