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Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN

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 HIPS-AGaiN team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • I was blown away by the scale and extent of what astronomers do as part of their research. The amount of data is mind-blowing and the amount of work that astronomers have to do to get the data that they need out of all of this data is just crazy. There are so many things to discover in the data, but you really need to have a plan if you want to discover anything.
  • I didn’t realize how important writing was to astronomy. It made me really happy, because I was a writer before I entered the astronomy field. It made me feel like my path suddenly made sense.
  • Learning at a high level! It was so empowering not to have things watered down!! Having the freedom to ask questions about anything and have those questions be considered valuable, even when they were outside the bounds of our project, was very confidence inducing. I also liked how my student and I became “peers” in this project.
  • [Qualities of an astronomer include:] Patience, curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm. Being comfortable without knowing what the results will be. Listening to what the data is telling you and not trying to force a conclusion. Having fun solving a mystery! Having fun using well proven methods in new and creative ways. Or maybe even inventing an entirely new way to do things.
  • Communication is more a part of “real astronomy” than I first thought. For instance, being able to balance the clarity of our approach with the ambiguity of the objects we are studying seems incredibly important to the research process. Being able to explain here is why we are doing this and why this method should work based on what we know and what we don’t know about AGNs.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN