Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA

Quotes

• [student:] I was surprised that despite humanity’s extensive mapping of the sky, astronomers still might not have all the resources that they need, and that often they must creatively make do with what they have. To the surprise of everyone, the [...] catalog ended up being insufficient for our needs and we needed to expand our search. But even though the workflow of the project was not progressing in the way we expected, the team did not skip a beat in accepting it and moving forward.
• [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.
• [student:] I realized that good astronomers admit their lack of perfect knowledge and remain curious to strengthen their own intuition and identify new issues.
• [Astronomers need to be] Patient, analytical, flexible and willing to change and being ok with not finding the answers they were hoping for.
• [student:] The best thing about this week was the sensation of work and progress. Learning about the relevant astronomy was definitely fun and valuable, but when we analyzed light curves, pored through databases, and created spreadsheets of candidates, I felt that I had taken tangible steps towards my goal. At that point, I had actually done astronomy, not just learned about it.

Related Teams

• OIRMA/Gorjian