• NASA
  • IPAC

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

  • The most interesting thing continues to be the experience of being treated as a social peer of scientists. This improves my confidence in the classroom when working with any kind of science. And I believe this confidence, rooted as it is in both the NITARP social experience AND the experience of actually having done some science (!!), is palpable to my students. This confidence makes me a more qualified emissary of Science to my students.
  • I am pursuing personal growth in terms of introductory level gathering of spectroscopic data and its analysis. I am pursuing knowledge and skill to transform my theoretical understandings of astronomy into practical real-world, data-driven inquiries for my students… variable star observing, color imaging, astrometric tracking of asteroids, etc.
  • The most interesting part of the whole experience was getting a glimpse of what real Science research is like–and just how variable it can be. I thought it was amazing that when the data wasn’t showing us what we expected, we were able to use different tools and shift our understanding fairly quickly.
  • ...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!
  • The main resources [we used] were the image data set that are available via the IPAC and other resources for our archival work. This combined with the tools that are integrated to allow easy searching for, processing of, sorting, summarizing, etc of the information was amazing. This combined with the ability of our professional astronomer to allow the space for us to experience the learning curve for what is available, how to get it, manipulate it, summarize it, analyze it and then to finalize all of that with the magic mojo of coding to crunch all of that into code to crank out hundreds of products ready for the next steps in the process was so impressive and empowering. I may not have the time to become a coder, but I appreciate the talent and skill that it brings to the science more so now that I have completed NITARP.

Related Teams

AAS - 2022