The .astronomy (dot astronomy) conference will begin tomorrow in Leiden at the Lorentz Center. There are fifty attendants and we’ll be covering outreach, web-based research, citizen science, and visualization in astronomy.
Tonight about twenty of the attendees got together and went out for dinner at a delectable pizza restaurant. Throughout the evening we introduced ourselves to one another. The surprising bit was how people went “ahhh, I know you!” after you told them your twitter name. A slightly strange experience, but I look at it in good light :).
Among the buzz of chatting, sharing stories, swapping expertise in geeky subjects we all had astronomy in common. Some are outreach specialists, others are programmers, in the middle are astronomers, and then a mix of everything. For the coming week we’ll share our ideas, projects, and expertise on various facets in the astronomy domain. Tomorrow we will begin with citizen science in conference format and then break out to “unconference” style in the afternoon.
Four of the five days will follow the conference and unconference format and the exception, Wednesday, will be where everyone contribute their efforts to hack day. There we’ll pool our time to jump start interesting projects that lay in the vicinity of .astronomy’s theme.
If you’re curious about the conference and want to know more check out the conference site: http://dotastronomy.com.