• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - 2024 - StarChasers

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 StarChasers team came to visit in July 2024. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 12 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I think that real astronomy is not just looking at different things in space, but actually researching different things using math and coding. I did not realize how much math and coding that goes on for scientific research and how that whole process goes.
  • [student:] The least surprising thing I learned was how much programming is integrated into the whole process. Data processing is a lot of work.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing I learned was the amount of collaboration and communication between astronomers.
  • [student:] I had no idea astronomers did so much coding. It makes a lot of sense when you're dealing with data sets with hundreds of thousands of points, but it was interesting that everyone at IPAC knows how to code.
  • [student:] Astronomy is hard, and it is not just looking through telescopes, there is a lot of math and critical thinking involved.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2024 - StarChasers