Report from the Annual Meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

By Aaron on September 16, 2006 at 9:18 pm | In Blog Posts |

Greetings from Baltimore. The theme of this meeting is education & public outreach, which is becoming somewhat of a mantra for the ASP. I haven’t seen any hard score science sessions yet, although the ASP publishes a major scientific astro journal.

The first talk I saw this morning was by Pamela and Phil Plait. Technically, I was a coauthor on that talk too. But I didn’t really contribute anything to it. Therein lies an illustration of an astronomical law. It is easy to get your name on an astronomical paper these days. Usually (but certainly not always), the last name(s) on a paper listing are there for beaurocratic and/or technical reasons. For example, they work in the same department. Or they wrote a piece of the grant that funded the work by the researchers. Or they are dating the first author’s sister.Well, maybe the last one doesn’t happen so often. (Do astronomy geeks even date?!?) But the point is that the first few authors do 90% of the work 90% of the time. Call it a 90-90 rule.

Their talk was about managing message forums and listserves. Such forums are becoming more and more frequent as astro organizations realize that they truly can trust the communities they serve.

It was announced that Google is working with the Space Telescope Science Institute (they who bring you HST, among others) to create a fancy version of Google Universe. Right now it uses SDSS data. One of the cool features it has is a press release overlay. So when an HST press release is issued, a spot appears on the point in the sky where the object of the press release is located. So you can just surf the sky and click on objects to get nice HST imagery and metadata. In a visualization session they demo’d it and it was impressive, as one would expect. The big worries are bandwidth. Google said to expect over a million requests per hour, but no one really know what to expect. And how to you prepare for an infinite range? This technology will play a key role in the long term development of data mining and distribution online. Right now the pros use sites such as ALADIN to overlay datasets. But its getting long in the tooth and smoother, fancier technlogies are needed to prepare for the upcoming firehouse of data that will come from the new telescopes now under construction.

I gave a talk in the afternoon about new media, and how to integrate it into outreach strategies. The key message is what is driving the new Slackerpedia Galactica projects. Basically, use the right tool for the job. Don’t try to put a web page into a podcast or a podcast into a web page. Use video, wikis, networking sites such as MySpace, etc. Find the tool that fits your message and use it. Don’t try to fit square pegs into round holes and be all things to all people.

That’s about it for today. Compared to AAS meetings, these are much more subdued. People tend to know each other and the pace is slower. The bar in the evenings was deserted! That seemed eery and unnatural to me. Tomorrow I’ll be attending more talks (since I’m involved in less of them) so hopefully will have more to report.