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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

  • [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.}
  • [In the classroom, I am planning to] increase my emphasis that what is written in a textbook is not the final word on a subject. Science is an ever-evolving mechanism of discovery and nothing remains fixed in perspective or proof.
  • This whole experience with NITARP has been amazing. I loved the chance to meet so many inspiring people. The astronomers we worked with were so excited about their work that I got excited, too.
  • The Aperture Photometry Tool (APT) poster really solidified my interest in computer programming. [...] He showed me that programming is intricate (and sometime tedious) art. It gave me a new appreciation of programmers who innovate so that the rest of us might have a less painstaking way of collecting data and/or using resources.
  • I found it most interesting to see the scientific process in action. Scientists were questioning scientists, sometimes fairly aggressively.

Related Teams

AAS - 2013