Summer "Visit" - 2020 - Spider Team

Quotes

• [student:] The most important and interesting thing I did was looking at CMDs and CCDs for each cluster of IC417. This mini-project really revealed to me that the NS and its BPI14 cluster are special when looking at their excesses in comparison to their cluster neighbors. This step essentially proved to me, scientifically, that we are digging for treasure in the right place, and that was a cool thing to see materialize in front of me.
• [student: The best thing was] Being able to work with other people around the country and feeling the satisfaction of correctly working on data that I assumed I would not be able to understand.
• The summer NITARP experience reaffirmed the incredible power of collaborative construction of knowledge and understanding. Astronomers have so much data available to them that it is overwhelming if not processed in small doses. [...] I have always known about the collaborative nature of science, but this experience has really made it clear how powerful it is as a check on erroneous understanding, poorly thought out processes, and simple error in work product. [...] I now see how much better the quality of the work is because of the collaborative process.
• [student:] I didn’t realize that most of astronomy is looking at numbers on a screen. It was hard work and intense math and it made me have more respect for the entire field.
• [student:] The most important quality [of an astronomer] has to be patience. I did astronomy work for four days and I found myself being frustrated quite often. But it takes time to learn from your mistakes and hence patience is an important quality for an astronomer, or any scientist for that matter.

Related Teams

• Spider/Rebull