• NASA
  • IPAC

AAS - 2014

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.

The 2013 and 2014 NITARP teams attended the 2014 January AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD (outside of Washington, DC). The 2013 class was presenting results and the 2014 class was starting up. We had a lot of alumni raise their own money to come back as well. We sent about 75 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. One of our participants, Peggy Piper, participated in a Congressional briefing on Thursday! All the posters we presented are linked from the team's pages below, except for HG-WELS and SIRXS, because they are the two new teams.

Quotes

  • I have been a teacher for 38 years, and have been in probably 18-20 special programs over that time to improve myself as a science teacher. The NITARP program ranks as one of the three best programs I have been in over that period of time. It helped make astronomy “doable” … learning to use the Kepler databases and some of the instruments, like periodograms, phase binning, etc., stretched us as teachers/student, yet helped us to realize we can do true scientific research. I personally thought our project was engaging to our students and myself, and wasn’t just another “cookbook exercise.”
  • What amazed me was how ingenious astronomers were with using data to its fullest and finding patterns in data that one set of astronomers see as unwanted “noise” in their data. One astronomer's noise as another astronomer’s treasure!
  • [student:] This experience totally changed my view of astronomy and my view of the people who are a part of it. Initially, I thought that astronomy was filled with emotionless scientists who stare at their computers all day. I found that this was not the case at all and I met some of the most interesting people through this program [..]
  • [student:] The experience was great and any opportunity to do primary research is always going to be interesting and you’ll always learn something new.
  • I came to NITARP hoping to learn how students visualize astronomy. In grappling through my own learning process I re-discovered learning to learn a totally new subject – for its joys and frustrations. But more so, I found a new way of teaching visually and the tools to begin programming what I hope will be lessons that help open more doors to students who might not get a subject on the first pass, but will be awesome at it with a few supports.

Related Teams

AAS - 2014