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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:] The least surprising thing is that we’re all nerds. No matter the location, we all geek out over the same basic things.
  • [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:] 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.
  • It is hard work here. Kids are DONE by the end of the day.
  • I was surprised at how different each of the students were in our group. Each of the 12 students had a unique perspective and approach to learning and doing and it was fascinating to watch them all do science in their own special way.

Summer Visit - 2024 - StarChasers