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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 didn’t anticipate how friendly professional astronomers would be to high school students. They were really open and excited to share their work and genuinely interested in what we were doing. I definitely didn’t expect the range of projects that they covered and it piqued my interest in many topics and in pursuing astronomy as a profession.
  • [student:] This experience alone has caused me to seriously consider majoring in astrophysics or physics in college and going into the field of astronomy. It has given me more of an incentive to work harder in my calculus and physics classes at school.
  • [student:] My favorite part of NITARP was to get an insight into the process of real research, where the results are not known and the procedure to be determined by us.
  • In the past, I had never tried to use raw astronomical data (such as .fits files at various wavelengths) for stars or open clusters because I didn’t know how to analyze it or where to find it. Now that I know both, I have already begun to create and test lesson plans that teach my students how to do such things as create representative color images from IR data, chart SEDs, or even do photometry or more advanced analyses. Now my students can do real science, and hopefully take the next step of getting our own telescope and camera and taking our own photos at chosen wavelengths, reducing the images, and analyzing the results.
  • [student:] The most interesting thing was the AAS Conference as a whole. In my life, I have never felt so satisfied, never been around so many bursting and brilliant minds. As a young boy with a passion for learning (and a newfound passion for astronomy), that trip has seriously impacted my life in ways I never would have imagined.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015