Have you ever wanted to save a Python/Matplotlib image directly to a file instead of having it displayed in an X11 window? I needed to do this for a project where I used qsub/PBS to submit jobs to a cluster and I wanted to plot some results for each run and save them to a [...]
The AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy and the AAS Employment Committee have compiled dozens of interviews highlighting the diversity of career trajectories available to astronomers. The interviews share advice and lessons learned from individuals on those paths. Below is our interview with Cara Rakowski, an astronomer turned Patent Examiner for the US Patent and Trademark Office. If [...]
This post is written by Jamie A. Budynkiewicz who works with the Chandra Software group at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Spectral energy distributions (SEDs) provide a wealth of knowledge about galaxies: their type, nuclear activity, luminosity, mass, star formation rate – basically, SEDs are pretty darn useful. Analyzing an SED involves loading the data, plotting it, [...]
This is a guest post by Cédric Foellmi, developer of iObserve, an observing app for OSX. iObserve, the OSX app designed to simplify your observing runs, is getting a major upgrade. After more than a year of development, many new features are available which should make the app attractive to an even wider audience. Since [...]
Sometimes the normal tables in LaTeX just don’t do it for you. You want to do something fancier or customize the table in a way that you just can’t do using the normal tabular environment. This is why I like using the Deluxetable style in latex. Deluxetable makes tables that are more flexible, and overall [...]
Organizing a conference can be a logistical nightmare. Picking a site, finding hotels, managing payments, inviting speakers, scheduling sessions (including those all-important coffee breaks)….and speaking of coffee breaks, do I need to buy coffee? Oh, and food. What about a banquet? How are the rooms going to be set up? Should I publish proceedings from [...]
Earlier this summer, Radhika Nagpal, a Professor of Computer Sciences at Harvard, wrote an article at Scientific American that resonated with a lot of academics. In her piece, The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life, Dr. Nagpal describes how she decided to ignore all the typical tenure-track advice [...]
This is a guest post by Matthew Turk, an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. This summer saw the twelfth edition of the annual SciPy conference in Austin, Texas from June 24th to 29th. Python users will recognize the name of the SciPy package, which includes a core scientific toolkit, but the SciPy conference has a [...]
This is a guest post by Caitlin Casey (IfA, Hawaii) and Kartik Sheth (NRAO) who recently hosted a “Diversity and Ethics” Seminar at the Aspen Center for Physics. The “Gray Zone” of Academic Ethics Your student gets a nasty email from a colleague insulting her work. You think your other colleague has plagiarized a [...]
This is a guest post by Doug Arion, Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carthage College. As astronomers, there are many things we wish we had been taught besides just astronomy and physics. While we learn a lot from the ‘school of hard knocks’, there are ways to make sure that [...]