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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

  • [student:] I thought that the most surprising thing we did was doing things that we did not learn before we went to Caltech. Before we went I thought we were very well prepared and covered everything, but there was some stuff like looking at other telescopes that we didn't do before.
  • Real astronomy is searching the sky and knowing we are not the center of the universe. That there is so much more out there than just stars and rocks.
  • There is so much more to Astronomy. I think this experience opened the eyes of the students to the various aspects of astronomy; one of the students was excited to learn she could incorporate her art into Astronomy.
  • The best thing about this trip was watching the confidence level rise in each participant. [..] By the end of the week, my two students felt so much more confident in their Excel abilities that they were helping others write formulas to make calculations easier. It was also exhilarating to witness [the other] teachers gain faith in their understanding of the project, as well.
  • I always imagined astronomy as someone at the end of a telescope looking at the stars, but today's astronomer is at a computer controlling a telescope miles away on earth or in space. The data are collected in mass amounts and need lots of people to analyze it. The industry is drowning in data and not enough astronomers to use it.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz