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AAS - 2015

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 2014 and 2015 NITARP teams attended the 2015 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2014 class was presenting results and the 2015 class was starting up. We had many alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

Quotes

  • [student:] I remember telling my teacher how jealous I was that others got to do this for a living.
  • In both of my NITARP experiences, we have run into major difficulties that triggered a complete reworking of the project. At this point, I think I would expect things not to go as planned on a given science project. This is not a bad thing -- it is just the way things tend to go. We did reach a nice result in both cases, but there were some bumps along the way.
  • [student:] I plan to now major in astronomy before going to law school, so that I can do science based law. Someone at the conference suggested this to me when I mentioned that I really love law, and they told me that since space travel is an upcoming field that I should look into that.
  • For some reason, introductory astronomy textbooks tend not to focus much on SEDs or color-color plots. However, these tools have cropped up in each of my NITARP projects. I imagine this is not a coincidence! I’d like to find a way to introduce these two key concepts in my introductory astronomy course.
  • [student:] I now better understand that there are many, many professional astronomers over a variety of specific fields. (The scale of the AAS convention really demonstrated this.)

Related Teams

AAS - 2015