AAS - 2018

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 2017 and 2018 NITARP teams attended the 2018 January AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD. The 2017 class was presenting results and the 2018 class was starting up. We had 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:

2017 teams:
- Science Poster - Evans et al., "Identifying Young Stars in Cepheus C"
- Education Poster - Stalnaker et al., "NITARP: Bridging the Gap Between the Traditional Science Classroom and Authentic Research"
- Science Poster - Rowe et al., "A Search to Uncover the Infrared Excess (IRXS) Sources in the Spitzer Enhanced Imaging Products (SEIP) Catalog"
- Education Poster - Orr et al., "NITARP: An Example of Effective Archive Data Based Research in the Classroom"
Returning Alumni teams:
- Science Poster - Johnson et al., "Relative Age Dating of Young Star Clusters from YSOVAR"
- Science Poster - Sweckard et al., "Software Development for Asteroid and Variable Star Research"
NITARP Management:
- Evaluations And Impact (presented as education poster): Rebull et al., "An Authentic Research Experience in an Astronomy Education Professional Development Program: An Analysis of 8 Years of Data on the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP)"

Quotes

[student:] I knew I was going to study physics [in college] but I think I'm going to move to astrophysics in the future after this experience.
I know now that I can develop effective data-based astronomy projects for my students.
The experience has shown me that astronomy research isn’t all about the pretty images we get to see, it can and I’m sure often does involve things that you never get to actually see.
[NITARP helps] Teachers learn that they are not alone and isolated like we often feel being in our classrooms by ourselves the majority of our career and that we need experiences like this to help us grow and try new things. Teachers learn that they can be of use in the research community. We learn that you don’t have to live in the same town to be part of a team that can accomplish a project.
[..]astronomers don’t spend any time looking through telescopes and most of them don’t even collect their own data—they use data collected by others and it is stored in enormous databases. They generally (probably always now) collaborate with others—there probably aren’t too many areas of current research that a person could do by him- or her- self—there is just too much data.

AAS - 2018

Quotes

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