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Summer Visit - 2011 - BRC 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 BRC team came to visit in June 2011. The team's core educators attended, along with 10 students. IPAC staff member Mark Legassie also assisted.

Quotes

  • Real astronomy is uncertainty. Real astronomy is making little mistakes that cause you to check all the data again. Real astronomy is perfectly human
  • I thought [astronomy] was just about looking at the sky and going, "Oh, look. There's a new star." It's not like that at all. There's a lot more work that goes into it from looking at the pictures to crunching the numbers to researching previous projects to see if what they are finding is right.
  • I never realized how much computer programming is done in Astronomy. I think this will help me reach out to students who might not be interested in "science." These students may not realize that their programming skills are vital for analyzing astronomical data.
  • [student:] Just like a real scientist, we worked with others to accomplish our goal by using the data and making graphs and calculations to find what we needed. We helped each other out, compared our answers, and learned from our findings and mistakes.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing that I learned was how much telescope data is available and how it is open for anyone to look at.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2011 - BRC team