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Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights

The summer visit to Caltech is 4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The Dust Mights team came to visit in July 2019. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.

Quotes

  • We had so much fun looking for interesting ways to parse the data to look for interesting subsets of our data to investigate. You could actually feel the excitement in the room.
  • Astronomy has always been about aggregating and parsing massive tables of data. So in a way, teaching us to do astronomy with data is just as primal as, and far richer than, anything we teach as “astronomy” in K-12 school (earth science can include some basics, and so can physics).
  • [student:] The best part of the trip was just the full experience that it brought. Getting to sit in a room and feel like I was contributing something to humanity's knowledge was just so unique.
  • [astronomers need to be good at] Cooperation - Most scientists in the modern age do not work alone.
  • [student:] I used to think astronomy was more about creating satellites and telescopes as an engineering challenge, but I now realize a lot of it is about analyzing data.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights