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Summer Visit - 2012 - HR4AGN

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 HR4AGN team came to visit in August 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 12 students, and one additional scientist.  The scientist mentor is Dr. Varoujan Gorjian. IPAC staff member Jacob Llamas (SSC) assisted, as did Dr. Jean-Christophe Mauduit (SSC).

Quotes

  • More gets done in this week than in all the rest of the prior time leading up to the trip.
  • The most interesting thing I did was organize data and actually understand what it meant.
  • The most important thing was that I really got a feel for how astronomical research is done. I found the discussions really interesting as well; every time someone found a trend or a possible trend in the data, there would be a discussion as to what they had found and whether or not it meant anything.
  • [It was not surprising to me that] the process of research and collaboration is not so easy; we are working through null results and that there can be times where it doesn't seem if there's any progress made, but we keep on trucking through the data anyway.
  • Before this experience, I thought astronomy [was] all about stars. Now, I believe, astronomy is about many things... Galaxies, stars, math...

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - HR4AGN