AAS - 2021

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results. This year, the pandemic forced the Jan 2021 meeting online, and meant that we didn't select a new class for 2021, so only one class is attending the online AAS.

The 2020 NITARP teams attended the 2021 January AAS. We sent about 30 people to the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

2020 Teams:

Science Poster - McElroy et al., "OIRMA: Optical Infrared Reverberation Mapping of AGN"
Science Poster - Anderson, et al., "Identifying Candidate Young Stellar Objects in the Spider Nebula (IC 417) Using Archival Visible and Infrared Data"
Education Poster - Rodriguez et al., "Methods for Retention and Promoting Self-Efficacy in Secondary Students in Astronomical Research"
Education Poster - Sharif et al., "Rich Experiential Education in a Remote Setting by NITARP"

Also see video "turbo talks" from ORMA team : science and education.

Quotes

[student:] I didn’t realize how math-involved astronomers are! Not only are they collecting data and observing, but they also analyze, sort, and interpret it.
The NITARP experience, with its focus on the teacher, and the allowance of inclusion of students, is a powerful engine for accomplishing [sharing how science works]. It ensures that the limited capacity of the program is leveraged through the many years, and multiple classes taught by a single teacher. The involvement of students binds these teachers to embrace participation to a depth and degree that makes the experience understandable to their future students by providing the evidence that a small number of their current students are getting it… it makes sense as it is occurring. And the passage through the whole process from unlimited brainstorming, to focused questioning, selection of a research topic, literature search, proposal, research, analysis, visualization, communication and defense of your results allows one to know, first person, how this engine works.
NITARP is not about the answer, but instead about how to find the answer. It can be reinvigorating to return to that wonder about how and why
This experience changed the way I thought about astronomy. I assumed there would be a wealth of data easily accessible to everyone. I had not considered that there would be gaps in coverage and that there are real limitations to real equipment used to gather the data.
[student:] This experience has taught me to feel okay to not know what the result will be when conducting a science experiment.

We're back from the Jan 2026 AAS and we had a grand time!

AAS - 2021

Quotes

Related Teams