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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.
  • [student:] I used to think astronomy was more about creating satellites and telescopes as an engineering challenge, but I now realize a lot of it is about analyzing data.
  • 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.
  • [student:] I honestly thought that “real astronomy” or “real research opportunity” meant fetching coffee or doing busy work for professionals. However, this thankfully turned out to be untrue. I really thought as if I were an integral part of the operation and the entire astronomy community because I was doing actual work in identifying and studying interesting stars with disks, dust, etc. I felt I was doing “real” integral work.
  • [...]it was great to see [the students] really dig in, ask questions, and show their passion for astronomy.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights