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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

  • Astronomers used to spend a lot of time looking through telescopes, and that is not the case anymore. It is a lot easier to get data these days (no more sitting on a platform keeping a guide star centered anymore), but there isn't as much connection to the sky. It is important for students to understand this.
  • I [thought] that there would be more computer work, and more telescope operating.
  • I didn't know just how much data is publicly available. Anyone can do astronomy - you just need to come up with a question and figure out how to use the archives.
  • 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.
  • Many of our "ultrablue objects" turned out to be B and A stars. This was surprising to the scientists, and they were scrambling a bit on the first day to figure out how so many of these main sequence stars had infected our sample. It was neat to see how they handled things, and how ridiculously fast they recovered. I think my students appreciated this as well. What a great example for them to see!

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Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO