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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

  • [student,in response to "most important or interesting thing you learned":] I also never knew about the great observatories. The only one I knew about was Hubble; now I know the 4 telescopes in space.
  • 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.
  • [student:] The best thing about the trip was that we were able to experience real science and not just a mundane lab in the classroom. It taught us about the uncertainties of science and that because what you are doing is new; no one has an "answer key" to your questions.
  • I was very surprised by the camaraderie among the students. They were not competitive and really worked on helping each other to understand the material and calculations.
  • [student:] The size of the catalogs that we created, and/or, contributed to was immense. I always knew that there was a large amount of work that goes into astronomy and research, but I was astonished by just how much.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2011 - BRC team