The below is reproduced from the January 2014 Status: A report on Women in Astronomy. The 2013 CSWA Demographics Survey, by A. Meredith Hughes, Wesleyan University. As we consider how best to promote the full participation of women in astronomy, it is important to use quantitative methods to monitor progress and identify problems. Accordingly, collecting demographic data [...]
As one of the co-ordinators of the Astropy project, I am very happy to announce that Astropy will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014 edition! For anyone not familiar with GSoC, it is a program that allows students around the world to spend three months during the summer contributing to an [...]
The below plot is my favorite data visualization I created for my thesis. It is a 2D density plot with histograms projected along each axis. I based the above plot on code from here, however this plot also includes a 2D temperature/density plot in the middle, and 1/2/3 sigma contour lines. Below is the code I [...]
This is a guest post by Travis Metcalfe who founded White Dwarf Research Corporation while he was a graduate student. In 2008 he initiated a non-profit adopt a star program that funds an international collaboration doing exoplanet science with the Kepler space telescope. He is also the author of an AstroBetter post about crowdfunding research. [...]
Data Science is a rapidly growing field, with natural opportunities for astronomers moving to industry. Recently, we’ve heard from Jessica Kirkpatrick about becoming a data scientist at Microsoft: part 1 and part 2. We’ve also heard from Stephanie Gogarten on switching to biostatistics at UW. Let’s pick up where Jess and Stephanie left off, and [...]
On Thursday, January 9th, a band of intrepid astronomers gathered for the second AAS Hack Day. Hack Days are traditional events in software development circles, where people with skills, ideas, and the willingness to dedicate a day of their lives get together to make interesting projects happen. Much like the first Hack Day at AAS [...]
Cross-posted from Women in Astronomy: The following is an anonymous guest post from a regular reader of the Women in Astronomy Blog. The below is a description of an individual’s experience with sexual harassment. What worked for her, might not work for everyone. If you are being sexually harassed, please contact the sexual harassment officer at [...]
This post was originally written by Erik Petigura who is a graduate student at UC Berkeley and visitor at the IfA, Hawaii working on exo-planet hunting. The post was modified by Jessica R. Lu to incorporate suggestions from a Facebook Astronomers Group thread on the same topic. Have you ever encountered a paper or proposal PDF [...]
We’ve had a week to recover from the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Let’s talk about what we thought worked, what didn’t and how we can improve the “Super Bowl of Astronomy”? (Last year’s discussion got 57 comments; this is a topic our community feels strongly about.) What did our Society do [...]
This is a guest post by Erik Tollerud, a member of the Astropy Coordination Committee and a Hubble Fellow at Yale University. His research focuses on Local Group dwarf galaxies and their connections to cosmology. In November 2013, we published the second public release (v0.3) of the Astropy package, a core Python package for Astronomy. Astropy is a [...]