Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA

Quotes

• I’m certain that I would not have been able to get the work needed done without the help of the group, teachers and students equally.
• [The best thing was] Meeting and working with the entire team, seeing the teamwork of the group in action, and being impressed by the talents of the students involved. Also, feeling comfortable with the content and the procedure we will be using to get our data.
• [student:] The most surprising thing I saw was how everyone was learning at the same time and all dealing with the same challenges. It was surprising to see the instructors figuring out TOPCAT at the same time as the students. It was also surprising to see how we encountered obstacles that were not expected, and we had to figure out in the moment. These things were surprising because I am used to a classroom environment where the answers to problems and predetermined and the teachers already know them. I appreciated this contrast to the classroom, and I believe that this contrast is one of the reasons NITARP exists.
• [student:] Real astronomy is not the enhanced pictures that ordinary people are used to seeing in the news or on the internet, instead it is data. It’s knowing how to manipulate this data to understand what it truly means. It is extracting from these numbers the structure of something that we can barely even see. In essence, astronomy is the ingenuity to turn something that is invisible into something visible. Something that I expected to be a part of scientific research was accessing the data and creating the light curves. Something that I did not expect to be a part of authentic research was the flexibility that was needed to obtain the data that you need.
• I understood that Astronomy is data driven, but working through this data analysis just enhanced my understand and the scope of this. I also understand better the challenges that Astronomers have in determining what data is needed and being able to access that data.

Related Teams

• OIRMA/Gorjian