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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

  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz