Chelen Johnson
[The most interesting thing during the summer trip was] the change in the students and their growth in confidence. The a-ha moments when the big picture came into focus for them. The tour of
JPL was fantastic, too.
Real astronomy isn’t just looking through telescopes with the naked eye anymore. It is really being accurate and precise and a lot of computer mathematics.
To me what stood out [at my first AAS] was the wide variety of work – from characterization of the structure of the Milky Way (more of a challenge than I ever knew!) to the search for and characterization of exoplanets to the understanding of how quasar evolution relates to the origins of the Universe.
