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Summer Visit - 2023 - AGNatha

The summer visit to Caltech is 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 AGNatha team came to visit in June 2023. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • This has really illuminated for me the "nebulous"ness of research, as in we really didn't know what we would find in the data until we dug in, and what we found then began guiding and shaping the new questions we wanted to answer.
  • The most interesting and important part of my week was seeing how the different databases can be used in conjunction to create a subset of astronomical objects with a specific set of characteristics. We certainly read about this in some of our background papers, but actually doing it brought the process to life in a different way than reading through the literature did.
  • I was surprised how quickly the group sort of meshed together and got to work. Not to say all the students were best friends by the end of the week, but I was surprised how quickly they were willing to work together and share ideas and contribute to the project. I honestly expected it to be more of the teachers teaching the students and then hopefully when we left everyone would feel confident to continue the work. I think we all picked a great group of students who hit the ground running and understood they were there to work and everyone was as well versed as they could be on the project on day one.
  • For me, the uncertainty associated with some of the data was surprising. In a chemistry context, where the researcher has control of the sample the data is much more direct, associating peaks in spectra with structure in the molecules. The idea that we are starting a project with a catalog of AGN, but are only 90% sure that the objects are AGN (R90) surprised me as I usually think of astronomy as much more mathematical and underestimate the differences in how data is collected compared to chemistry.
  • [student:] I learned that the type of research that astronomers do is not my forte which is very beneficial because as a rising senior [I need to know what I don't want]

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - AGNatha