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 loved looking at the IRSA catalogue and gathering the data. To put it into the Topcat software and actually see, with my own eyes, individual points of data from a real, legitimate, astronomical object was incredible.
[student:] I wish my classes were taught with more focus on understanding and retention than just throwing spaghetti at students’ brains and hoping it sticks. With NITARP, I enjoyed the focus on retention and understanding taught through practical application as opposed to the pasta-flinging method familiar in school classrooms.
The most interesting thing I did over the whole year was seeing the entire process of how [we] thought of [the] research question, then how we would gather the data to explore it (using IRSA) and then learning the software (Topcat) that made sense of the data. The reality of the experience matched my expectations. It was a bumpy process, with points where we needed to pivot.
[student:] [As a result of NITARP,] I have more confidence in myself that I can tackle challenging topics that I have no previous knowledge of and can eventually work through them
[student:] I think the value of NITARP comes from experiencing a new way of learning those things. Actual research just isn’t something students can do in school. Sure, I’ve gone through labs before, but it just doesn’t compare to a long, arduous project that is finding something we actually don’t know. There’s a whole new level of value to be gained from feeling like you’re contributing something to the scientific community.

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

AAS - 2021

Quotes

Related Teams