Jane Rigby

Review of Book about Gemini Observatory

by Jane Rigby February 1, 2012

On a long flight, I read a fascinating and frustrating book about the history of the twin Gemini 8m telescopes and the optical/infrared astronomical landscape: Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology by historian Patrick McCray. Time for a book review and a new wiki page for books! “Giant Telescopes” is two books in one. The second half [...]

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Category: astro community Tags: , ,

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Pretty plotting of spectra? [Ask AstroBetter]

by Jane Rigby January 27, 2012

What tools (or self-rolled code) do people prefer when making big publishable figures of spectra?  The example given was an echelle spectrum, where the spectrum is loooong, and has many spectral orders to stack onto one or more pages of the journal. Since this is a shamelessly self-generated Ask AstroBetter, I will award a beer [...]

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Category: figures

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What I Learned About Astro Outreach From Giving a TEDx Talk

by Jane Rigby January 23, 2012

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Category: public outreach, teaching Tags: , ,

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What Operating Systems Do AstroBetter Readers Use?

by Jane Rigby December 28, 2011

Following our post on how Hubble users’ operating system choices have evolved with time… Here’s a summary of the operating systems used to access AstroBetter since May 2011: Grabbed from Google Analytics. Our readers are considerably Mackier and less Linuxy than I would have thought. Comments? And Kelle points out the small-but-growing fraction of y’all that [...]

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Category: astro community, OS X

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What operating systems do astronomers use?

by Jane Rigby December 20, 2011

Previously on AstroBetter, we’ve discussed what operating systems are used in our profession, in particular relative numbers of OS X (Mac) versus Linux users. While it’s good for us at AstroBetter to know our readership, we can use Google Analytics for that. It’s more important for the astronomical community to know the broader landscape, so [...]

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Category: astro community, OS X Tags: , , ,

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Digitize that figure, fast

by Jane Rigby November 17, 2011

Here’s a common workflow:  ”I want to overplot a curve from the literature on my new plot.  I could write the author and wait several days for them to dig up the plot file and send me the digitized version, but I want to compare now!” One solution is to digitize the published plot. I [...]

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Category: applications, figures Tags:

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Solid state drives – a geekout

by Jane Rigby November 7, 2011

Today I’m going to geek out about solid-state drives. I recently purchased a 120 GB solid-state drive for a desktop.  It doesn’t hold my data; just the operating system and frequently-used programs.  It cost about $200. The speed difference is striking.  The computer boots in only a few seconds, but the biggest difference is the [...]

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Category: high performance computing, productivity

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What about MS Word?

by Jane Rigby November 2, 2011

I wish I lived in a world without Word.  But I’ve finally accepted that, outside our little corner of academia, when you need to send 100 words of information, you send a Word document.  Every office party flyer, every travel authorization form, gets sent as 10 MB of Microsoft bloatware. (Why?) I used to complain.  [...]

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Category: applications Tags: ,

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Update on grad student unionizing

by Jane Rigby June 22, 2011

New developments over at NYU with larger potential impact:  an NLRB official says that grad students trying may actually be employees: In a decision issued last week, Elbert F. Tellem, acting director of the NLRB’s regional office in Manhattan, said the graduate assistants, practically speaking, have “a dual relationship” with the university that is “both academic [...]

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Category: Career, policy Tags: , , ,

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Terminal bake-off

by Jane Rigby June 10, 2011

Linux and OS X users:  what terminal do you use, and why? Choices include (but are not limited to) xterm, iterm2, & Terminal. I suspect that many of use the defaults because they’re the default. I’m one of them. Please tell me what I’m missing. Update—Kelle took the liberty of adding a poll:

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Category: applications Tags: , ,

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