Sorry if this is not the best reading, I wrote it a while ago :)

My experience at the 241st American Astronomical Society meeting was amazing! I went to more than 30 presentations, and multiple press conferences and I met lots of incredible people who are established professionals in the field. I brought my Grandpa, who is a retired high school science teacher. It was so fun sharing this week with him. My whole experience with astronomy started because I was bored at lunch one day and I was reading science articles. I found one about the Citizen Science Project titled; Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. This is a database where everyday people can search through data coming back from the WISE satellite for irregularities. During the time I was searching, I found something (most likely a brown dwarf star). I turned my findings into the program and got invited to the super user's group that meets monthly over zoom. These calls are with other users and astronomers from all over the World. This experience has led me to some amazing opportunities.

During one of the Planet 9 meetings, I got invited to work with a researcher at CALTECH named Davy Kirkpatrick. He has a mentoring program for high school and undergraduate students. I work with people all around the country. When I heard the meeting was happening in Seattle I asked him how I would sign up to attend. He said that Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has funding from NASA and that they can use that funding to send me to the meeting. After some emailing back and forth they signed me up, covered my costs, and I was ready to go.

Meeting Journal

January 8, 2023

When we first arrived on Sunday morning my Grandpa and I went to check into our hotel room. While we were checking in the hotel clerk gave us our room key that had a funny cat in space on it! When we got our hotel room set up we went and got our badges for the meeting.

We walked over to the convention center that was just across the street. We went to registration and got our badges. We then attended the Graduate School Fair. There were lots of colleges that had set up booths and were recruiting Graduate students. I talked to people from the University of Hawaii and it made me think that I will want to get both an undergraduate and graduate degree in anything in science. We also attended the opening reception which was a great networking opportunity. I met a group of people from M.I.T. that had developed a new technology significate reduces the amount of shaking in a space probe launching into space. On our way to dinner, we got a picture with the A.A.S. signs at the entrance to the convention center.

January 9, 2023

The next day we woke up at 7:00 A.M. to get ready for the day. I made myself breakfast then we walked to the convention center for the Welcome Address by the A.A.S. president Kelsey Jhonson. She thanked everyone for attending the meeting and said that there were over 3,000 people attending both virtual and in-person. She introduces the first plenary speaker Jane Rigby to talk about the Science performance of JWST (James Webb Space Telescope). It was an amazing talk about how the JWST is performing and what it has done and can do for humanity. They shared a lot of information that was not yet released to the general public about what JWST will be doing in the future.

After the talk, the exhibit hall opens where there are lots of very interesting booths set up. Some of the coolest were the National Science Foundation, NASA, CALTECH, and MIT. My Grandpa and I go to a few before he gets a coffee (they had free Starbucks for everyone) and sit down. At the table we sit at there is someone else, and after a while, we begin talking. She was amazed that a high schooler was at the meeting. I asked her some questions about what I would need to do to get a job in science one day. She said that the best thing to do is participate in a summer internship. She told me all about some of them at colleges and how to apply for them. After about 15 minutes she paused and said "you know what, let me give you my email so I can send you all this information because it is a lot." She then takes out a piece of paper and writes down her name and email. After talking for a while more I learned she got her Ph.D. recently and is working at the University of Wisconsin. I saw the time and realized that the next talk started soon, so we went to our separate talks.

I decided the talks in the "Star formations theory and models'' session looked the most interesting. These talks were extremely complex. Every other word was new to me. I had to google words like Praesepe, bok globules, and deuterium fusion (all real words). After the second talk, I decided to go to the special session titled "How to Teach and Talk about Climate Change." When I went into the room my Grandpa was already in the front of the room talking to someone, so I sat down next to him. There was a question about climate change on a projector everyone was supposed to be answering. When everyone was done answering it they went around the room and what was said made me realize a lot about climate change and how to get people to care about it.

What I learned was that we have to show people how going eco-friendly will benefit them. One person talked about how they convinced a person who didn't like the electricity company to get solar panels because they would then be getting their electricity from themselves, not the company. This was really enlightening for me because it made me realize that people don't care about something unless it impacts them.

As we were leaving my Grandpa and I was trying to decide where to get lunch when I got a text from someone I knew from the Planet 9 group asking if I wanted to go to lunch with them. When I showed it to my Grandpa he was excited to go and meet them. We walked 5 minutes from the convention center to the restaurant. I see them as soon as I walk into the restaurant. I have been on zoom calls with them before but I never have seen any of them in person. I introduced them to my Grandpa and we got seated. It was at a Chinese restaurant. I was very nervous because I had never had real Chinese food before. We began eating and took a selfie of ourselves.

I talked with Dan about computer programming. Dan coded the website people use to view data from the Wise satellite mission. He told me that I should learn the coding language python because that is the most commonly used language for scientific research. Les was wearing a t-shirt for a citizen science project coming out soon called Backyard Worlds: Cool Nabors (you should look it up, it is very cool). Doing the citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is how Dan, Hunter, Les, and I all got involved in astronomy and why we all got to come to the meeting. Hunter was a citizen scientist and because of it, he went to college to become an astronomer. We talked about college and about how cool the meeting was. All 3 of them were presenting something at this meeting, so I set a goal by the next winter meeting to be able to present something.

Dan told us that later that day he was going to be doing a presentation on how citizen science projects are awesome and that we should go to it. After we got the bill my Grandpa and I went back to our room for a little bit. After a while, we strolled over to the convection center for Dan's talk. When we got there I sat up in the second row. The rooms fill very fast. The first person to talk is Marc who runs all of NASAs citizen science projects. Then Dan talks. He talks about how citizen science is good and how it has improved his life and how to make people more involved in it. Then 2 more people talk. After that Marc asks all of the citizen scientists to stay behind and take a photo, which I am including here.

After that I went to 2 more plenary talks, both were very cool. One of them was a panel discussion with the members of the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority. The discussion was mostly people talking about the new observatory that was being built on a sacred mountain in Hawaii. The panel was people from the board making decisions on the astronomer's side of what to do. It was very interesting hearing what both sides had to say.

The second plenary was about X-ray light echoes and how we can hear what a black hole sounds like. It was so cool to listen to this one because I had read an article on this a few months before and it was fun to hear about it from the person who led the project instead of a reporter. After that talk, my Grandpa and I went back to our room for a while. We then went to dinner with one of my friends who lives in Seattle who I had not seen in 4 years. It was very fun seeing them.

January 10, 2023

The next day my Grandpa and I got up and ready to go. We were slow that morning so I forgot to eat breakfast. We went to the convention center and listened to all of the prize announcements for 2023. It was very cool being here for this because I was one of the first people to hear about the prize winners. After that, we listened to the talk Heart of Darkness: The peculiar life of a supermassive Black hole. It was very fun learning so much about black holes without it being simplified from news sources. Sadly there were some graphs in the presentation that were very hard to understand. Some graphs were extremely complex. I showed one to my math teacher to see if she could help me understand. This was the first time I had seen 3D grafts.

After that, I ran over to a special session that was going on "What should I do with my Life? Create your unicorn Career." I think this was one of the most important talks that I went to. The talk was by Alaina G. Levine she taught me how to talk to people in a professional setting. One of the best parts was talking about how to email people asking for internships or jobs. She said that you should not say "can I have a job…" or "can I help you …" but say "I can help you by…" This made a lot of sense to me and I have used that and many other things I learned from this talk when talking to people even though it has been less than a week. Making your unicorn career was about telling people how you can help them and they create jobs that are specialized just for you.

After that finished I went over to the press conference my Grandpa was attending "New Developments in the World of planets.'' It was really cool because they announced so many new things and I got to be there when they made the announcement. One of the things that they announced was that they have found more Earth-size planets and in the habitable zone planets around other stars. Later that day my Grandma sent me an article about that and I got to tell her I was at the press conference when they announced the finding.

Then we ran over to the plenary talk "A star is born". I learned so much about how stars are formed by gas clouds. In the future, we should expect the formation of many new stars because there are lots of big gas clouds that are going to spark in the near (100,000,000 years) future. After it was finished I went downstairs to talk about "Space as an Environment."

Space as an environment was one of the coolest things they talked about this week, and something I think more people should know about. They talked about how we are polluting space and how we are launching too many satellites and how that is bad for both astronomers and animals. A number of satellites are circulating in space and it is becoming harder to see into space from the earth. This is causing ground-based telescopes are having to make changes to how they operate. It is severe enough that they may become obsolete. They also talked about how it negatively impacts our environment when we shut down satellites. The shutdown satellites become space junk. They may smash into other satellites damaging them. One thing they mentioned was that when staples burn up when falling back to earth, in the atmosphere they are releasing heavy metals into the atmosphere. They are also killing animals by polluting the world with heavy metals. A quote one of the prisoners said that I loved was "because the earth is 70% water there is a 3/10 chance a satellite will land in an area where humans are. So when it lands in the water it is considered a win, but the fish don't think of it that way." This quote got me thinking because sometimes people may think what they are doing is good and positive, but not everything that they are doing is good for all of the stakeholders. When everyone was leaving I noted that the president of the AAS was sitting in the front of the room. I saw that she thought this was an important talk.

After that, I ran over to the Daily Press Conference "Stars and their activity" where my Grandpa was. Sadly it was just finishing up when I arrived but my Grandpa said it was not as interesting as the one before and I have not seen any articles about anything said in it so that would make sense. After that, we went back to our room and rested for a bit because we had a crazy day. I decided to look at the canvas and I noted that I had not turned in my Spanish homework. So I get my laptop and I see that our hotel charges for wifi so I bring it to the convention center.

I went over to the Plenary Talk: "The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer: Astrophysics on the International Space Station". I got there a few minutes early so I brought out my laptop and turned in my Spanish homework :). Once the talk starts they talk about how they engineered and sent a telescope to the ISS that was able to help find neutron stars. This was very cool because I had not listened to any talk about engineering. I found the discussion about engineering very fun and exciting because I had seen photos taken from the telescope they were talking about. After that, I went back to my room and got ready for dinner. This dinner was the event I had most anticipated and was the most nervous about attending. I had been invited to go to the Elephant and Castle Pub by Marc Kutner who works at NASA.

My Grandpa and I are the first people to arrive, and we were 5 minutes late. They sat us at a table for 18 people and it was just us. After a while, people started to trickle in. At the table, my Grandpa and I are at there were 18 people. 15 of them had PhDs, and the other person who didn't is defending their thesis in March. We had some amazing conversations with people at the table. The people I sat near were so cool. I talked to the person who runs the citizen science project Disk Detective and the person who runs Exoplanet Watch. I also talked to a woman who runs a non-profit organization where for a semester she gets high schoolers to monitor a binary star system. They get time on telescopes and by the end of the semester, they have a paper that they are ready to publish.

When I was talking with her she said that if I had not had a paper published by the time I am getting close to applying for college to reach out to her so she can help me. This made me feel awesome because she said that she thinks I can get one out before, but just in case she would help me and it just made me feel so awesome about myself (I may be a co-author on a paper coming out soon). She also asked me if my school knew what I was actually doing and I told her not really. So this is my way of telling my school, hello school. I do lots of other things like this. I do multiple citizen science projects and I am involved in a machine learning project called SMDET that helps find more stars. So I do lots of cool things. I also do lots of zoom calls and talk to some cool people.

After a while, Marc (the guy from NASA!) talks to me. After I thank him for helping me have this amazing opportunity; I ask him what I should do to get a good job in science one day (my go-to question) and he said that I should get a summer internship at NASA or at a college. After he tells me about them he says he will help me get one! I was so excited. I was so happy that people care about me so much to be willing to help me. After talking to the people near me for a bit I said to the people I had lunch with on Monday. Les says that if I come to his poster that he is presenting he has a t-shirt I can have. I tell him I will be there and go back to my room. When I get back I call my mom and tell her all of the cool things that happened at that dinner.

January 11, 2023

When I wake up I pack most of my stuff. I then run over to the convention center to go to "Do we have a standard model of cosmology?" It was very cool learning about how people are trying to relate everything to everything else. We then go to see Les's poster. It is very cool because they talked about how we are finding new stars using programs people (mostly Dan) are making. He then gives me a Cool Nabors t-shirt that is very cool. After that, I go back to my room and bring my things to my Grandpa's car with him. We then went back to the convention center for one last talk. "Why is the day 24 hours long?" We expected this to be about how the earth began spinning the way it is but it