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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

  • I had no idea, perhaps idiotically, how much data analysis went into astronomical research. I learned that in order to be a successful astronomer you need to be able to code and understand raw data very well.
  • [NITARP] helps teachers and students see what STEM careers are like. That it's not ivory towers, and that a lot more people can do it.
  • NITARP gives kids a chance to move from the staged, contained, constrained world of science demonstration and rote learning methodologies to the messy, chaotic, beautiful, and sometimes nonsensical world of real science. Kids get a chance to learn about pushing at the boundaries of human knowledge where astronomers have to use real world data that does not necessarily fit any previous theory about what is supposed to happen. Teachers and students have to learn about the technology and use their brains to consider the meaning of this data, looking for trends and similarities to tease out possible explanations.
  • 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.
  • I tended to lump astronomy in with theoretical physics and its stagnation to some extent. Obviously, the opposite is true. The pace of discovery and analysis is amazing.

Related Teams

AAS - 2023