Chelen Johnson
The HIPS AGaiN (Hidden in Plain Sight AGaiN) team will be using archival surveys for stellar variability to detect variability in active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the background.
It’s addictive—this is not like any other program that you have ever been through, where you participate for a while and then finish up and then it’s just something that you did once. I have found that I don’t want to stop[...] A certain percentage of us, at least, can’t put this down once we are exposed to it.
I think the best part about the trip and NITARP as a whole is the chance to do authentic research and learn the methods and techniques used to tease as much information out of the data as possible. It still amazes me (and this is what I try to instill in the students in my astronomy classes) that we can learn so much from a tiny point of light if we are just clever enough to know how to look at it.
My takeaway lesson is that the students are much more tolerant of "issues" that make the research projects difficult to carry out and are generally content to be involved and learning something new.
