Chelen Johnson
Cosmic dIRt is examining the Spitzer Enhanced Imaging Products catalog to find the most unusual and faintest infrared excess objects serendipitously detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
My life has changed in some way because of my participation in this program. My wife, my children, and my co-workers have all remarked at how I am different now. I don’t know whether it was the program, the people that I worked with, or some combination of the two, but whatever it was something about it changed me. I know that “life-changing experience” was not one of the outcomes that you hoped for when you planned the program, but it is what happened with me. Thank you very much for allowing me to participate— this has been one of the best years of my life.
The "new" astronomy has become something we all knew was coming: handling huge chunks of data and learning how to mine this information from sets so large that it is simply mind boggling. The interesting thing is that many people are not aware of this, notably teachers in the trenches.
...students, given an interesting task, could stay on task for hours at a time.
