• NASA
  • IPAC

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:

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

  • [student:] Something that I did not anticipate was the better understanding of different people. I really enjoyed working with a team of people with diverse backgrounds.
  • My students were inspiring during this project, even when frustrated. They wanted to keep plugging through even when it was hard.
  • I was also intrigued at how we can figure out so much while knowing so little: just by knowing a few numbers such as the magnitudes at 4 IR channels, we can model and predict debris disks around stars, including size and distance. At the AAS, listening to people’s presentations, it was also interesting to hear how they are able to model distant systems and galaxies with the data they used, and how they can test these models. Before, I would hear of what we thought something might be like, but never heard much about why we thought it was that way or what the next step in our investigation might be.
  • What has changed about my teaching is how I go about asking questions, and I have modeled this after the way Varoujan asks questions and WAITS. I don’t know if he knows this, but he is a master at what teachers call ‘wait time’, which is the process of waiting for students to answer a question and not jump in to answer it for them. He is so patient when asking all of us questions, and it gives us a chance to think and figure out the answer, even if we get it wrong the first time. Most teachers are not good at ‘wait time’ because they are uncomfortable with silence and want their students to know the answers. I have learned to ask better questions with my students and patiently wait for answers, and if my students have the wrong answer, it is OK, we work to figure it out together.
  • I enjoyed the process of original, authentic research. It was exciting to not know the answer: I was eager to see where the process took us and what we would find in the end. It was also cool to realize that I was helping to add a very tiny bit to the pile of human knowledge, that, somewhat in the words of Whitman, “the powerful play goes on, and I can contribute a (very tiny) verse”.

Related Teams

AAS - 2023