Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA

Quotes

• [student:] I realized that good astronomers admit their lack of perfect knowledge and remain curious to strengthen their own intuition and identify new issues.
• The best thing about the week was being able to contribute to a real project where we don’t know the answer. [...] It was refreshing to have the chance to explore and analyze.
• Working together was super powerful because with many eyes on the same problem it takes less time to find new avenues and catch missteps.
• Real astronomy is DATA. It is having to think outside the box to turn the invisible visible by using multiple sets of information from potentially multiple sources. I expected this would be part of the research project but was surprised by the ability to successfully change methods for data collection during the project.
• Working with a highly expert mentor astronomer is crucial. (this is not a surprise, but just got reinforced!) On day 3 it turned out that we had WAY fewer AGN to work with than expected. I was scared that our science was in trouble. Varoujan came back morning of day 4 with an alternate approach to developing a catalog that opened things up again.

Related Teams

• OIRMA/Gorjian