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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

  • The most interesting moment to me was looking through the images of possible planetary nebula nuclei and actually finding one. The moment that the page loaded and the image came up, my partner and I exclaimed, "Whoa!" It was interesting to look at and a great experience.
  • I was amazed how much the astronomers we met loved their jobs! It seemed as though everyone we talked to [...] was deeply passionate about what they were doing. From what I saw, astronomy truly seemed to be a field full of enthusiasm and genuine excitement for each new discovery, no matter how small.
  • Data-mining is more accessible to laymen than I had supposed.
  • 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.
  • I [thought] that there would be more computer work, and more telescope operating.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO