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Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights

The summer visit to Caltech is 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 Dust Mights team came to visit in July 2019. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] This completely changed my view of astronomy and astronomers because I had this unrealistic idea that they just sat in an observatory all day looking at planets and stars and wrote down what they found, published it, and called it a day.
  • Astronomy is imagination powered by math and inspired by the sky. I am surprised and delighted at the sheer volume of data available and all the opportunity hidden inside it.
  • The most surprising thing [to me] was being left for a day to just work together and try to put everything we learned together in a reasonable way. It was very helpful, just surprising. Also that we used trigonometry!
  • We were all so different from each other, yet all so open to each other, all so open to making mistakes in front of each other, all so open to the messiness of true learning in front of each other and our kids. This was important and interesting.
  • [student:] The thing that surprised me most was how clear the picture was afterwards. I went into this barely even understanding what we were trying to do, and now I'm feeling confident in my knowledge of almost everything we talked about. It was super satisfying to just have everything click into place.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights