AAS - 2023

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. 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 2022 and 2023 NITARP teams attended the 2023 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2022 class was presenting results and the 2023 class was starting up. We had alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 30 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

2022 Teams:

Ciambra et al., A More Complete List of YSO Candidates in AFGL 490
Benter et al., Survey of the Spitzer Enhanced Imaging Products (SEIP) Catalog for Potential Debris Disks Around Main Sequence M Class Stars
Bonham et al., NGSS Science and Engineering Practices in Secondary Education through Real Astronomical Research
Swigert et al., Teacher Roles within NITARP: a 13-month Research Collaboration

Alumni:

Granucci, "Does a Solar Telescope generate more interest in astronomy than Night Observing Telescope?" (talk)
Kniezewski, "To Rain or Not to Rain: Correlating GOES Flare Class and Coronal Rain Statistics" (poster and press release; student alumna!)

Quotes

Through NITARP, I’ve become aware of many more opportunities available to teachers than I ever knew existed.
Participating in NITARP provides teachers with a true nature of science experience. Most classroom educators have not experienced the shaky ground of not knowing the answer. It is a challenge NOT to be the expert and know all the answers when working with students. However, this is precisely where teachers can truly impact science education. Teachers experience a deep understanding of what it is like to be a student, model what lifelong learning looks like, and how to persevere through challenges.
Hearing from last year’s group of students and educators confirmed for me that students do like to be challenged as long as they feel supported, and that discomfort can be part of the learning process as long as it doesn’t end there.
What I already knew about astronomers/astronomy that was confirmed was that you need to work really hard to do research and that often there are things you see in the data that you can’t necessarily explain right then and there. There is still a lot we don’t know and so much archival data still to go through.
I thought I understood how very focused a research project was, but it is even more so than I thought. Each published paper has a ton of info on a narrow topic (with lots of data). I just thought research was more like a textbook - lots of connections to other knowledge and sciences. "Big picture" stuff might get lost sometimes.

AAS - 2023

Quotes

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