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Summer Visit - 2013 - CM4Sy

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, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The CM4Sy team came to visit in July 2013. The core team educators attended, plus 11 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I have found that astronomy is much more than peering through telescopes. Astronomers analyze data collected from various instruments and observatories to either prove a theory or to make new ways to explain the universe.
  • [The most surprising thing was that] Some hypotheses do not succeed, even with the best scientific ‘assumptions’ and backgrounds…. I know – it’s not all that surprising really, but it was interesting. I’ve seen this many times before, but it always brings me to my favorite place when “doing” science: now what?
  • [student:] It seems that many people believe that astronomers are either extremely geeky people who live with their noses buried deep in their computers and whiteboards or people who chart stars by looking through telescopes all night. In reality, they are people who are very smart, love their jobs, and are extremely excited to share their work with others. I did expect to be working with computers (particularly Excel), but I was grateful for the history of our project and the ability to learn more about our project before diving straight into the more complicated aspects. For example, plotting all the data we were given was much harder and took longer than I had formerly expected.
  • "Real astronomy" is diving into the unknown. Asking a question that does not have an answer yet and trying to solve it. That's what we did. We are trying something completely new and I love how I don't know what were going to get. That is real science. We can do labs, but often times, they are done with expected answers. [This experience wasn't that at all.]
  • I was surprised at how open the analysis was. I expect to be told what to find, however, we didn't know what we were going to find. I found that very cool.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - CM4Sy