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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

  • [...]it was great to see [the students] really dig in, ask questions, and show their passion for astronomy.
  • [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.
  • [student:] Real astronomy is a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort to learn and know what you need to do. It also takes a lot of creativity. It amazes me that we were able to figure out not just how to do things, but what to even do next. I expected to have to figure things out, but it was really interesting to have to figure out what to figure out.
  • [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.
  • We got a chance to share in astronomer’s sense of satisfaction as we problem solved and experienced success in choosing a path to follow in our investigation.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights