Summer "Visit" - 2020 - Spider Team

Quotes

• 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:] 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:] Before the experience with NITARP, I wasn’t really educated about the astronomy field, but I just found it amusing. Now after I know what kind of work they do, I am even more interested even if it can be a little confusing.
• [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.
• [student:] Some important qualities to have as an astronomer is patience, ambition, and open-mindedness. Working with tedious data becomes frustrating certain times especially when there are instances you mess things up. With the creative process being so up and down, it’s imperative to be patient during hard times and work through it, even when the results aren’t what you were expecting. Furthermore, with being open-minded, it’s primarily aimed at collaborations and feedback since someone might have different opinions on your research or questions on why you didn’t explore something. With that it’s important to take everything into consideration and keep working.

Related Teams

• Spider/Rebull