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Summer Visit - 2010 - LDM team

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The Luminous Data Miners team came to Caltech in July 2010.

Quotes

  • [student:] I figured we would simply insert the image and the computer would calculate all of our numbers for us. But we had to adjust many settings and use our expertise to find magnitudes for the galaxies.
  • [student:] This was a different kind of work to me because we are working in a team that is spread all over the US, which makes the work a little more challenging but also very interesting
  • [The most important thing I learned was that] You have to double check everything you do always, because one slight mistake can throw everything off.
  • Astronomy is an art. There is no obviously right answer, as in math, but instead more and less logical interpretations. Robots can therefore only work as data collectors, not data analyzers, for astronomy.
  • [student:] The environment at NASA is learning-oriented. It's really fun to work in a place where everyone is so focused on astronomy with as much collaboration as NASA does.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2010 - LDM team