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

Bracketing the NITARP experience between an opening and a closing AAS meeting empowers us as participants to see that the process we are developing and the research we are doing is legitimate. The opening meeting sets a model in our minds for what the end of the project will look like. The closing meeting makes us defend our work… the real closure on science… peer review! The overall experience makes it clear to me that I am in the right place professionally. I love the research process.
What took place over the previous 12 months for myself and my students involved in the project was authentic learning. My students and I were interested in the project not because of a grade to receive at the end of the project nor because of a test that would assess our knowledge and determine our progression with respect to our peers.
[student:] This experience has taught me to feel okay to not know what the result will be when conducting a science experiment.
[student:] I never knew how much astronomers worked with computer programs and data, and I think this helped me gain a new sort of respect for them: this is not easy work!
Young people need to be exposed not to just the body of knowledge that science has produced. In the modern world most of that can be looked up anyway. The essential experience that is needed is to see the way in which science works.

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

AAS - 2021

Quotes

Related Teams