Inga's Coming Out Conference

On October 12th 2008 Inga Koch gave her very first poster talk at a professional conference! Yesterday afternoon Inga presented her summer research project at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting of the American Astronomical Society at Cornell University. No shrinking violet Inga had no trouble communicating her project to lead scientists from around the country. Enough people stopped by to chat so that she kept pretty busy for the whole two hours. The man with the blue shirt and the strange pocket is a principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Center. You can't really hear Inga in the video but you get the idea.

Inga did the work at Astronomy Camp outside Tucson last June. She spent a week at the Catalina observatories on Mt. Lemmon. Teenagers from around the country spend the week staying up all night observing the night sky with "big boy" toys like 60" telescopes at their disposal. She loved it. Some nights I believe they just spread their sleeping bags out on the concrete floor of the observatory. Not much sleeping going on and lots of group cheers for things finally located! She hopes to go back if schedules match up next summer.

Oh yes, her project was characterizing the 5992 Nittler asteroid which happen to be named after her uncle Larry. He was given this asteroid or the option to name it as an award several years ago. Getting to name an asteroid was fairly common among yesterday's crowd because there were several other scientists who wanted their asteroids studied too. Inga could set up a nice home business if only we had an observatory in our backyard. And no clouds. No clouds in Upstate NY now that would be some kind of global warming...

This should all look pretty good when applying to college if only we could find one she likes! We are hunting for a school where there will be other pink/purple haired science loving chillins. Nope MIT isn't a good fit...