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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:] Real astronomy seems like a lot of melding of Boolean math principles with subjective reasoning, and it's really cool.
  • [student:] This experience made me realize that astronomy is much more data driven than I would have previously thought. Also, there’s a fair bit of automation in the data sorting, without which I don’t think much would get done.
  • [student:] Astronomy is hard, and it is not just looking through telescopes, there is a lot of math and critical thinking involved.
  • [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 best thing about the trip was the fact I got to do so much stuff that I had never done before. This was such an amazing opportunity to learn about not just the field of astronomy but also about myself. I found out that I actually enjoy interpreting data which I definitely did not think would’ve been fun before.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2024 - StarChasers