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Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO

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 UBOKO team came to visit in August 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

 

Quotes

  • I didn't really think of astronomy as having a deep basis in research until this trip. It was interesting to see this new side of astronomy.
  • Data-mining is more accessible to laymen than I had supposed.
  • Regarding teaching, I will change how I teach stellar spectra. I haven't been emphasizing blackbodies enough, and I have been too focused on the kind of spectra you get out of a spectrograph. As I walked around at the AAS [last winter], I realized that SEDs are widespread (and not covered at all in most astronomy textbooks) and lightcurves are very common too. I will place more emphasis on these two topics in the future.
  • I was amazed how much the astronomers we met loved their jobs! It seemed as though everyone we talked to [...] was deeply passionate about what they were doing. From what I saw, astronomy truly seemed to be a field full of enthusiasm and genuine excitement for each new discovery, no matter how small.
  • I expected the amount of work we had to do with the data, but I did not expect the amount of fun I had working with the data! I thought that it would be a boring, painstaking process, but in the end it turned out to be very exciting.

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Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO