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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

  • The most surprising thing that I learned was that I could finally look at the data we were dealing with and make sense of it.
  • 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.
  • I think "real astronomy" is not simply about looking up at the sky and discovering new things, but having a passion for it and educating the public about what's really going on.
  • I was surprised at the variety of approaches we would take in trying to identify sources (particularly those with sparse data).
  • [student:] The most important thing I learned is my new-found interest in astronomy and the sciences. After seeing JPL and Caltech, I realized that science is where I want to be in the future.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz