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Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 Cold Spotz team came to visit in June 2012. The core team educators plus 8 students attended.

Quotes

  • Real astronomy isn't just looking through telescopes with the naked eye anymore. It is really being accurate and precise and a lot of computer mathematics. I am glad I get to share this idea with students that this is what it is really like out there in the science and technology fields.
  • This experience completely changed my views on astronomy. The biggest shock for me was when I found out that astronomer don't actually sit in an observatory and look out a telescope all day. It's gotten more complex then that now, but that image of a person in a white lab coat looking through a huge telescope was the image that used to pop into my head when I hear the word astronomy.
  • I am so surprised that after working my brain for many hours each day, I could understand what [we were talking about]. While I am a teacher and love astronomy, I am not up on all of the terms, and even [the] concepts that we used so readily. I am surprised that my brain clicked over and got is quickly (relatively speaking) and that by the end of the week, I too was speaking in these ways.
  • I think the most interesting and important thing I learned was how this project was going to all come together. I finally understood exactly what we were doing and why.
  • Before I found out about how real astronomers work, I thought that as part of the research, we would have an hour or so where we would sit at a telescope and look for objects.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz