• 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:] Finding out how much coding was involved in all areas of astronomy was surprising. But to be honest I found everything I learned here surprising.
  • [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:] 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.
  • It is hard work here. Kids are DONE by the end of the day.
  • [student:] The least surprising thing is that we’re all nerds. No matter the location, we all geek out over the same basic things.

Summer Visit - 2024 - StarChasers