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

Meeting astronomers at the 2024 AAS meeting who were interested in our work brought home the idea that we were doing meaningful science during the project.
I have [already] added many examples related to our project as examples in my classes. In some of the lower level classes I use steps in our process as examples for a discussion of the scientific method.
One of the best parts of my experience was to watch my students, with very limited science education offered to them at our rural school, work through the challenges.
I'm definitely going to be bringing in even more hands-on experiences in my astronomy classes, beyond just using IPAC resources, thanks to exposure to tools and resources that are out there that were shared in some of the talks, especially the astronomy education talks.
Most of the time from Jan – Oct ’23, I would just say incorrect stuff when trying to talk through the project. It was frustrating thinking I had gotten a handle on one aspect of the project only to be misunderstanding some other aspect. The gentle but constant correcting of [our mentor scientist] was absolutely necessary and useful to the group as we all made these mistakes. Also meeting every single week meant that we all got very comfortable talking to each other and saying the wrong and not bristling at being corrected. Also [our mentor scientist] took a lot (a lot…) of questions from us and the students which again just made the whole group feel comfortable and able to press forward confidently.

AAS - 2024

Quotes

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