Chelen Johnson
The Dust Mights team will be searching for Galactic sources in the Spitzer Enhanced Imaging Products catalog which have an excess amount of infrared light and whose distances are known from Gaia observations.
Real astronomy involves working as a team to find an answer. The NITARP program provides a unique, real-life experience in real astronomy to the teachers and students involved.
[Because of a poster I saw at the AAS and] my participation in the NITARP program, I will be raising the standards for my students in the future.
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.
