Crowdfunding Astronomy Research

by Guest February 22, 2012

This is a guest post from Travis Metcalfe, astronomer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and former chair of the AAS Employment Committee. In 2008, with a grant from Google, he established the Pale Blue Dot project, a non-profit adopt-a-star program that funds an international collaboration supporting the Kepler mission. Motivated by a perfect [...]

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Category: proposals Tags:

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So you want to be a frequent flier? (Part 1)

by Guest February 17, 2012

This is a guest post from Adam Kraus, a Premier-Platinum flyer on United/Continental who specializes in HNL-LAX and HNL-SFO, plus frequently travels through DEN, ORD, and BWI. He also is an Emerald Executive with National and has Gold status with Hilton. In his free time, Adam is a Hubble Fellow at the University of Hawaii [...]

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Category: travel Tags: ,

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Marketing for Scientists: A Book about the Business of Doing Science

by Guest February 15, 2012

This is a guest post by Marc Kuchner, a staff scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center.  Kuchner is a former Hubble fellow, and he won the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award in 2009 for his work on exoplanets. He is also the author of a new book that we should probably all read. Six years [...]

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Category: Career Tags: , , ,

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Code in the Astrophysics Code Source Library is now citeable

by Guest February 8, 2012

This is a guest post from Alice Allen, primary editor of the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL). Last September, I introduced and described the Astrophysics Source Code Library, a free on-line registry for source codes. I’m happy to report that ASCL is now indexed as a publication by ADS! This provides a reliable and consistent [...]

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Category: programming Tags: , ,

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Astropy website/logo design competition

by Tom February 6, 2012

Last Monday, I wrote about the Astropy project, and mentioned various ways of contributing to the project code and documentation. We’ve now launched a competition to design the website and logo for Astropy, with a prize for the winning entry, so if you’re looking for a fun way to contribute to Astropy, this is your [...]

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Category: python Tags: ,

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LaTeX on the iPad [Ask AstroBetter]

by Kelle February 3, 2012

K asks: Any way to mark up text with Latex on the iPad? Or any other tablet? Without internet access (on an airplane)? I’m spending a lot of time on days-long international flights, and in economy class the risk is too high of the person in front of me lowering their seat and encountering my [...]

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Category: applications Tags: , , , ,

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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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The Astropy Project: A core Python package for Astronomy

by Tom January 30, 2012

In June 2011, the announcement of a new Python package for Astronomy on the astropy mailing list prompted a long thread that started as a criticism of the proliferation of independently-developed Astronomy Python packages but quickly became the start of a common effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy. Many hundreds of emails, [...]

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Category: programming, python 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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