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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

  • I didn't really think of astronomy as having a deep basis in research until this trip. It was interesting to see this new side of astronomy.
  • [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.
  • 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!
  • I expected the amount of work we had to do with the data, but I did not expect the amount of fun I had working with the data! I thought that it would be a boring, painstaking process, but in the end it turned out to be very exciting.
  • 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.

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Summer Visit - 2012 - UBOKO