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Summer Visit - 2012 - C-WAYS

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The C-WAYS team came to visit in July 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 12 students, and two additional scientists.  Dr. JD Armstrong (LCOGT/UH) and Dr. Babar Ali (IPAC) also assissted.

Quotes

  • One evening, while working on some homework, I had the realization that THIS WAS REAL. There is no right answer, in fact, no one knows the answer. I can't just go and ask someone the answer. It was like a light bulb went off and I experienced a feeling of excitement and also felt a little bit scared. I thought to myself -- Is this how astronomers feel about their work? It was a great feeling and exciting that I too am part of this now.
  • Everything after the uploading of the images was new to me. And no matter how much it surged over and drowned my brain, the wave of new knowledge was quite welcome.
  • So far, this experience has greatly changed the way I thought about astronomy. It made me realize just how much work really goes into all of the things you see. It also helped me get an idea of what it really means to be an astronomer; it's not just sitting at a telescope taking beautiful pictures.
  • "Real astronomy" involves a lot of data analysis. It involves a large amount of time spent at a computer rather than at a telescope. Astronomers have to know a lot more about programming than I had expected.
  • I was surprised to see the amount of work was needed for a seemingly small job. To have stayed for such a short amount of time and to have done so much work [..] was overwhelming.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - C-WAYS