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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

  • 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.
  • NITARP is the shining example of science outreach to public education, and should be a model for similar federal entities, such as CDC, DOE and even the NEA. Any entity currently providing grants could make their impact more palpable by sharing their work and culture directly with high school teachers and students as NITARP does. A program like NITARP turns teachers into adult representatives of the discipline at its heart; a program like NITARP makes every day in the classroom a Career Day.
  • [student:] I always used to think astronomy and research, in general, was a very cutthroat, individual field where it’s every scientist for themselves. But through NITARP, it’s become clear to me that astronomy is nothing like this at all. The whole goal of this field is to work together to create a greater understanding of our universe. Everyone is collaborative, encouraging, and happy to help you learn.
  • 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.
  • It has become commonplace for me to contextualize a concept, lesson or procedure through the reality of my NITARP experience. This makes the experience of my students live in a space in which the science itself is not a body of knowledge or a collective of results, but instead a living thing… in which they are participants already and that can grow with their engagement and growth in knowledge and skills. There is always a question for the now, a process for challenging ourselves to try to figure out an answer, and an infinite prospect for new question that arise from both the process of inquiry and the results obtained.

Related Teams

AAS - 2022