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AAS - 2013

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. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

We were out in force at the AAS 2013 meeting in Long Beach, CA! A record number of NITARP-affiliated people attended, including the 2012 class finishing up and the 2013 class getting going. The 80 or so NITARP-affiliated folks made up about 3% of the AAS attendees.

Special article on AAS attendees!  And don't miss Danielle Miller's blog!

Quotes

  • Data taken for one purpose may often be exploited for other purposes. This is the genius of the archives. Even without access to a telescope, anyone with ideas, intelligence, and little computer savvy can do a lot of good science!
  • I have a much better sense of what research astronomy is about now, and I think I will have more confidence to try new things (related to astronomy) going forward.
  • Adapting to not having the answer in the back of the book was something that I never registered upon beginning this, which wasn't expected.
  • I was impressed with how poised the students [from 2012] were and how they were able to answer all of my questions. Each of them spoke to how NITARP had been a very positive experience. All of the young women I spoke with talked about wanting to pursue science in college.
  • [student:] This experience completely changed the way I looked at astronomy and astronomers; at first I thought that astronomy was a very specialized topic and that they are very few astronomers. Now, I know that astronomy is very vast and can go from cosmology to astrophysics. I didn't know there was an actual difference between the two! Also, I learned that there many of us, and the numbers are growing; this is something I don't ever want to leave. {Ed: note that this student is referring to "many of us" because they already self-identify as an astronomer.}

Related Teams

AAS - 2013