• NASA
  • IPAC

AAS - 2020

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2019 and 2020 NITARP teams attended the 2020 January AAS meeting in Honolulu, HI. The 2019 class was presenting results and the 2020 class was starting up. We had alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

2019 Teams:

NITARP Management:

Returning Alumni Teams:

Quotes

  • We did not anticipate getting all of the way through our selection process and then find that a crucial step used invalid data! But it was very satisfying to step back, and figure out a process that would give us useful results in the end. It was a great way to experience for ourselves the fact that it is normal to encounter obstacles in research.
  • [student:] The most interesting thing I learned is the fact that the astronomy community, including the astronomers at NITARP, were very collaborative and certainly friendly. I usually just assumed astronomers kept to themselves and/or thought that they were too good to help a high school student like me understand their research. This welcoming community did not at all follow my expectations and showed me that the professional astronomy field, and hopefully other STEM fields, are friendly.
  • It was great to experience working with students more as colleagues than students.
  • I would not have been able to do this on my own. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to try! Being a part of this group provided the instruction, encouragement, and feedback necessary to get started, and to work through the challenges.
  • This experience reduced so much of the mystery about how astronomy research is done, and made it much more accessible. I know there are still so many ways that astronomy research happens that I don’t know, but this experience makes me feel like I’d be able to relate to those other methods, and envision being able to do the work.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020