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AAS - 2022

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is usually 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. At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2020/21 and 2022 NITARP teams had planned to attend the 2022 January AAS meeting in Salt Lake City, UT. However, the meeting was entirely cancelled due to COVID. We still have this special article about the NITARP teams finishing and starting up. All of the posters from the 2020/21 teams we presented are here. Most of the 2020/21 teams came instead to the June 2022 AAS meeting in Pasadena, CA instead. Those posters were iPosters, so the PDF versions that are here are still the versions from Jan 2022, but the numbers are from June 2022.

The 2022 class got started on Jan 9, just before when the winter AAS would have been held. There are two teams in 2022.

Quotes

  • ...learn enough to answer 80% of your questions while recognizing 10 new ones, and getting just enough data found, crunched, visualized, considered and understood to still not quite have caught up with your goals. But that is science… the real-world, messy, challenging, inspiring world of science. Embrace your curiosity, embrace the opportunity to question and to explore, embrace the 80% success that you will achieve because that, along with the remaining 20% you will never get to, is what the next scientists in the line will be able to pick up and run with as the data that drives their inquiry. You are scientists in a long line of scientist that have been, are, and shall always be… so have FUN with it!
  • [student:] I have always wanted to be an engineer, and although NITARP hasn’t changed that ultimate goal, it has given me an extreme passion for research. Now, I want to get involved with undergraduate research as soon as possible in college, and without NITARP, I don’t think that interest would have emerged.
  • It was transformative to carry a project all the way through from “Yah, IC417… that sounds like it could be cool” to the representation of scientifically valid results in our AAS poster and the publication of a catalog of 512 new candidate YSOs. Some small piece of the collective knowledge of astronomy was produced by our team. That is empowering personally, but more importantly it is transformative for the conversations I can have with my students (in and out of NITARP). These conversations have made the occupational choice of astronomer be more “real” for the students, and thus has increased the number that are actively entering into undergraduate programs thinking that astrophysics is for them as a career.
  • My experience with NITARP has reinforced that the essential traits of an astronomer are a willingness to question the “obvious”, wonder about what is not yet known, and persistently (and openly) recognize the limitations of your present understanding, knowledge, skills, tools… and then do something to overcome the limitations. It has also become crystal clear just how small of a community the world of professional astronomers really is at present. It was also amazing to see how openly the data is shared for anyone with the time, talent, inclination, etc to pursue astronomical inquiry. And putting these last two together… there is SO much data filling the bucket that there is no shortage of questions to ponder nor data with which to pursue resolving them.
  • [student:] NITARP gives teachers and students a deeper appreciation of astronomy research and astronomy careers.

Related Teams

AAS - 2022