The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results. At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. However, for this AAS, since it was thought that this was the end of the program, only the 2008 class attended.
The 2008 Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students teams attended the 2009 January AAS meeting in Long Beach, CA. The teams presented a total of seven scientific and educational posters at the meeting. This last set of teams formally part of the Spitzer program did such a good job of impressing the right people that we were able to secure funding for the program's new incarnation as NITARP.