Anyway, I started with a couple pages on Periodicity Analysis. I’ll migrate other stuff over as I have time.

I had other ambitions as well. One was to write other pages as well, such as lists of observatories and their pros and cons. The idea there is that I could find out which, say, IR spectrograph I should be using for a project. Another idea was to link snippets of code as examples of how to implement algorithms. I thought this would be a way to share code without having to support it. Any thoughts?

One thing that I’m been thinking on is making figures with images. I tend to do this a lot and the process is really laborious. I know APLpy is an options, but it chokes on radio astronomy images, which typically have at least four axis (RA, DEC, Frequency, and Stokes). I’d appreciate it if people could post more info/suggestions on the wiki for this sort of thing.

Many other astro-wiki efforts suffer eventually because of the lack of an audience. The nice thing about pairing the wiki and blog is that the blog keeps bringing people into the site with new articles and the wiki provides a useful reference to past blog articles and comments.

Here is an example of how I like to use the wiki. Recently, I needed to calibrate some NIR imaging data for absolute photometry using IRAF. There were about 8 different (and all useful) documents/webpages/notes on how to do this. So rather than just making personal bookmarks or storing the links only in my research notebook, I started an absolute photometry page under Data Reduction and put all the links there. Now perhaps it will be of value to someone else; but if I ever need to do this again, I can easily find the references. The page is by no means complete (I would like to add links to the various standard-star catalogs, etc.); but it is a start.

As Jessica mentioned, if someone has something to share but doesn’t want it on their personal webpage, or that url is too temporary or not interactive enough, I’d be happy for it to live here. For example, I really think it makes sense to put observing and data reduction notes on the AstroBetter Wiki instead of on a personal webpage. At least on the wiki, there’s the potential for the community of users to comment, ask questions, and/or make modifications as necessary independent of the original author…and independent of the usually disappointing “official” support pages.

But, we’ll see how it goes and what it turns into…

There are (of course) quite a few astronomy-related wikis out there already, serving various different communities (for instance the Berkeley Astro Department Grad Students wiki, or the Integral Field Spectroscopy Wiki. Do you intend the Astrobetter wiki to focus on any one particular area (productivity, software and tools?) or is it pretty much anything goes?