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Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO

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 UBOKO team came to visit in August 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

 

Quotes

  • This experience made me realize that sitting in a room for several hours doing research did not necessarily have to feel like work. This improved my opinion of astronomy even further by making me realize just how much I enjoyed it.
  • I didn't know just how much data is publicly available. Anyone can do astronomy - you just need to come up with a question and figure out how to use the archives.
  • Regarding teaching, I will change how I teach stellar spectra. I haven't been emphasizing blackbodies enough, and I have been too focused on the kind of spectra you get out of a spectrograph. As I walked around at the AAS [last winter], I realized that SEDs are widespread (and not covered at all in most astronomy textbooks) and lightcurves are very common too. I will place more emphasis on these two topics in the future.
  • Many of our "ultrablue objects" turned out to be B and A stars. This was surprising to the scientists, and they were scrambling a bit on the first day to figure out how so many of these main sequence stars had infected our sample. It was neat to see how they handled things, and how ridiculously fast they recovered. I think my students appreciated this as well. What a great example for them to see!
  • [It is] not surprising but always jarring when the research plan doesn't go as planned and adjustments are made, or a redirection of purpose. I think it is actually an important piece of the process since students are used to having an known goal that they can reach if they follow directions.

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Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO