If you've been following my blog, you know I
was lucky enough to be part of the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program,
or NITARP. It was an amazing year and the program wrapped up with a trip to the
American Astronomical Society meeting with two of my students in January.
The AAS meeting was a ton of fun this year, just like
last year. It was way colder, but a ton of fun. I’m glad I had students with
me, but it was definitely more difficult to plan sessions and posters to see with
students who didn’t have a huge astronomy background. They were great at the
science we did and I could see light bulbs any time any one mentioned light
curves or Kepler… but some of it went right over our heads (myself included).
Our time at AAS 223 started with a trip to the opening
reception. It put me and my students a bit out of our comfort zone. I’m not
super good at mingling and high schoolers are usually super uncomfortable with
just walking up to adults they don’t know, but we managed alright. Probably my
favorite moment was when one of my students walked up to a professor from
Vassar (where she’ll be going in the fall) and introduced herself. She’s
usually pretty quiet, so I was really excited that she at least said hi.
Our second day was very very busy, especially because our
poster was up! We started with the
Plenary Session with Robert Williams from the Space Telescope Science Institute
about the Hubble Deep Field. If you don’t know about the Hubble Deep Field, you
should! The photo was taken in 1995 and at the time was not very popular
because it was pretty risky. The results however, are amazing, and the photo
contains more than 3,000 objects, most of which are galaxies. Why is it so
important? As Robert Williams said during the session: "if you want to
understand the present, look into the past." If
you’d like to learn more about the Hubble Deep Field, check out this really
cool NASA resource: http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/hubble_deep_field/
We also checked out the “Planet Hunters”
session, which was a really cool view of exoplanet astronomy and citizen
science with Dr. Meg Schwamb. If you’d like to look for exoplanets by studying
stellar variability or as she said, “flicker, jitter, and crackle” be sure to
check out http://www.planethunters.org/.
Citizen science
really is great. During the session, she said that there have been 20 million
classifications by 280,000 people since 2010. Also, the Planet Hunters ‘Talk’
feature is like facebook for light curves. Conversation and collaboration is
huge in citizen science.
Next, we
visited the Kepler town hall, which the students were very excited about
because we used Kepler data to do our research. They had an updated graph of
exoplanets found with Kepler (which has now been updated again and you can see
here: http://www.nasa.gov/content/sizes-of-known-exoplanets/#.U7HXj5RdWSo).
The K2 mission was the highlight of the town hall, because Kepler’s reaction
wheels went a little funky, the telescope couldn’t really keep doing what it
was doing, but scientists were able to figure out another way to do the science,
and now, it is! (I still think if NASA could have figured out a way to get Mike
Massimino up there, he somehow would have been able to fix it. I’ve seen that
Hubble movie at Kennedy Space Center a bunch of times.)
After
a full first day, our even started with us talking at our poster! All of our
other team members took the morning shift, but we had the last one… and it was
AWESOME. So many people stopped by to talk with us and the students had a great time meeting people, answering questions and talking all about our
research. Everyone seemed pretty impressed, and a few people even asked us if
we were going to publish our results! Once the time was up my students and I thought that we wished we had more time. Talking to everyone was way more fun than we expected (we were pretty nervous at the beginning!). It was definitely a little weird to feel like we just squeezed a whole year of work and research and red giants into one poster and one day of talking to people...but I guess that's science, right? Just in case you still haven't seen our poster, you can check it out here! http://nitarp.ipac.caltech.edu/system/media_files/binaries/130/original/miller14.pdf?1387236406
Then we headed to a NITARP meeting/discussion
session/photo shoot with everyone in the program and right to something I was
pretty excited about, “Tales from the Twitterverse and other Media Excursions”
with Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you were on twitter and following along that
night, you know that Dr. Tyson did not impress everyone, but my students and I
thought it was great. I thought he followed along pretty closely with the
description in the program and my takeaway was that social media can be very
powerful, if used the right way. (My other takeaway was that sometimes if you
make one person mad, lots of people on twitter will join in on the mad – even if
they’re not there.) Dr. Tyson shared a great story with us about how learned
his lesson about communication after an interview with a local news station. He
said he gave them a great interview, but because he didn’t talk in sound bites,
they only took one part, something about him saying stars wobble – while doing
a little dance. The dance was all they showed. From then on, he decided to only
speak in sound bites, which translates very well to twitter’s 140 character
thing. He also focused on using humor to communicate science, which is where I
think some people were offended. He did use some colorful language, but he
warned us about it at the beginning, and I didn’t feel like it was stuff my
students couldn’t handle, they hear things much worse in the hallways at
school, for sure. According to this website which was shared on twitter that
night, Neil Tyson has way more followers on twitter than all the other
astronomy folks combined. http://lucretius21c.wordpress.com/astronomers-on-twitter/
My final tweet that night was this:
@d_l_miller:
take away from @neiltyson at #aas223? Use twitter (and other social media) for good. Make science accessible. The people will make it cool.
Our third day started off with running into Neil deGrasse
Tyson on the escalator (no, really!) and a few more sessions. We started with “Observing
Asteroids for Fun and (Astronomical) Profit” with Linda French, which was a
great Amateur talk that both my students and I found interesting and easy to
understand. We learned about how asteroids can reveal lots of things about the
early solar system and that, according to Linda French “light can move
mountains in space,” it’s called the Yarkovsky effect…and it’s really cool.
Even though our research was with Kepler, we learned about Spitzer during our
time at Caltech in the summer, so we also went to the “Spitzer Space Telescope:
The Next Ten Years” session. The scientists estimate that even though it’s been
going strong, Spitzer can continue to make observations until 2018 or so. If
you haven’t been keeping up with Spitzer news, you really should! Cold brown
dwarfs, exoplanet atmospheres and interiors, young stars, supernovae, galaxies,
clusters… it’s awesome! You can learn more at: http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/ One thing I noticed during that session though,
was that each of the presenters- even though doing very different - all said something
along the lines of “before Spitzer, we couldn’t do this.” Isn’t science great?
Next, we went to the NASA Education and Public Outreach Event
with the director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, Paul Hertz. Because the room
was mostly full of local students, it wasn’t super high level science, but he
did make sure to communicate to the students that STEM is important, that no
one at NASA works alone- collaboration is key, and that science is always
changing. We then walked around the exhibit hall for the education
presentations, and stopped at a few really cool booths. We saw a robotic model
of the JWST, talked to the Chandra x-ray folks, and learned a bunch from the
William Patterson University Astronomy club. The NASA town hall we went to next
was pretty enlightening…the James Webb telescope is a really big deal, in case
you didn’t know. At the end, someone in the audience asked about education and
public outreach (if you’ve been following along you know is in an…interesting…place
right now) and the answer was a very quick “talk to congress.” So, people, talk
to congress! Our brains were pretty full by that point, so we decided to take a
quick ride on a boat on the frozen Potomac. Later in the evening, we attended a
star party in less than favorable single-digit weather for us ladies from Florida. Luckily,
there was hot chocolate, and a few trips to just inside the convention center
doors so we could sit directly on top of the heaters. We were able to see Jupiter with its moons and our moon up close, plus we took some really cool photos with my just my iPhone held up to the eyepiece of the telescope!
On the next day, we managed to get into Washington, DC.
My teacher self would have felt pretty bad about bringing 2 students who had never been before to right
outside the nation’s capital without at least running through. So we did a
whirlwind few hour trip to the Air and Space Museum (which had a really cool
Spirit and Opportunity exhibit), the Natural History Museum, outside the fence
of the White House, past the Washington Monument, into the American History museum
and then back to the hotel. Yes, our feet hurt. Yes, it was very cold - in the teens, I think. But it
was also very fun and full of learning new things for all of us.
The last day there were lots of education posters up –
lots of cool resources – and we went to a few talks on stellar evolution, but
by then my students and I were pretty tired and overwhelmed by everything. Our
trip back went well and it was time to dive right back in to teaching and my
team’s robotics league championship the next day. The girls did a lot of work
while I was away, so we made it states for the second year in a row.
I procrastinated on this blog for awhile… and as I sit
here finally finishing it, I know why. I just don’t want NITARP to be over. And even though NITARP may be over for me, it
could be just starting for you! The application for 2015 is available here: http://nitarp.ipac.caltech.edu/news_item/408
and is due on September 22nd. Go on, apply…for SCIENCE!
