NASA/IPAC Teacher
Archive Research Program

I've been involved in many professional development activities and this is by far the best one I've ever done

Chelen Johnson

Cold Spotz/Chary

Cold Spotz: Using the submillimeter wavelength all-sky map generated by the Planck satellite to classify 4000 previously unidentified radio sources into the following categories: extragalactic radio sources, star-forming galaxies, stars within a dust shell, cold stellar cores, or asteroids.

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Our Participants Talk About NITARP

[at the 2013 AAS,] I was always struck by the focus on ensuring the data is real and using modeling to create templates when classifying objects or processes.
One of my students at Niles West had become interested in GRBs as we thought they were the results of mergers of black holes [but we learned this was wrong at an AAS plenary talk]. My student thought it was interesting that scientists could change their minds about how things worked.
The more I talked with astronomers and support staff at the different booths [at my first AAS], the more I began to realize that being a teacher, and an amateur astronomer, is really very different from being a professional astronomer.