• NASA
  • IPAC

AAS - 2025

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2024 and 2025 NITARP teams are attending the 2025 January AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD. The 2024 class is presenting results and the 2025 class is starting up. We had alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 40 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the press release on NITARP from the AAS, and the special online article about NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here. (In addition to the iPoster sessions as listed here, the physical versions of the 2024 teams' posters were up at the IPAC booth all day Tuesday.)

2024 teams:

Alumni:


Quotes

  • I've already introduced a new research project in my astronomy class using IRSA last spring, and I'm working on refining it for inclusion in the astronomy class I am currently teaching. After doing the Rubin "Coloring the Universe" activity, students get a tutorial on IRSA, and have to come up with their own questions that they would be able to possibly answer by generating images using IRSA.
  • [student:] I thought astronomy was more about looking and observing the pictures and less about the numbers and math.
  • The reality of how astronomers build on each other’s research hit home when another researcher came over during our iPoster session to [share his results on a problem similar to ours].
  • I wasn’t 100% sure what astronomers actually did – I thought they all needed “telescope time” and when they didn’t have it they just looked at whatever they got the last time they had it. The incredible amount of data out there we already have is staggering.
  • This experience turned out to be more work than I thought it was going to be but it was a welcome challenge and I was so surprised of the amount of work that we accomplished and the new understandings that I was able to conceptualize.

AAS - 2025