This is a joint post between Astrobetter and Astrobites.  Nathan Sanders is a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University, and an author for Astrobites.  If I walk up and down the hallway of graduate student offices in my building and ask a dozen of my classmates to tell me how they [...]

This is a guest post by Alessondra Springmann. The original article can be found here. The astronomy and planetary science communities have a fantastic tool for finding scientific papers previously published: the Astrophysics Data System, or ADS, supported by NASA and run out of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  The main feature I use is [...]

Sick of dull, uninformative diagrams on your slides? We’ve added a link to our Presentations Wiki on how to make your diagrams more understandable, efficient, and pleasant. If you remember nothing else, keep this in mind: simplify! Already taken a stab at simplifying? Do it again! And don’t forget, if you have any presentation resources that [...]

This is a guest post by Christine Slocum, a software engineer at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), on behalf of the Ureka team. Last month, STScI and Gemini announced the first public beta release of the Ureka binary installer for common astronomical software (primarily for the UV/Optical/IR community). The goals of the Ureka installer are [...]

I don’t fully understand it, but I know the Astronomical Journal (AJ) and Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) are different than many other journals: They are run by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and not by a for-profit publisher. That means that the AAS Council and the members (the people actually producing and reading the science) have [...]

This is a guest post by an anonymous contributor. There has been a lot of talk recently about the effect that sequester cuts have had on the funding situation in astronomy (and science in general).  Our field depends greatly on federal grant money (jobs! job! jobs!) and the pot is shrinking.  This means that every [...]

Struggling with too many commitments? You might want to try a powerful and simple time management technique: saying “no”. In this post at GradHacker, Stephanie Hedge offers a list of questions you should ask yourself before before jumping into that next committee:  When someone comes to me asking for a favor, or looking for help [...]

Despite a variety of efforts at all levels, minority representation in the sciences remains stagnant.  This was one of the take-home-messages at the (relatively) recent American Institute of Physics (AIP) annual Assembly of Society Officers. The assembly is an opportunity for member organizations (e.g., AAS) to come together and discuss common issues of concern. The [...]

This is a guest post by Scott Fleming, an Archive Scientist at Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).  Scott received his PhD from the Univ. of Florida, and was a postdoc at Penn State University prior to joining STScI. His research interests are binary stars, substellar companions, and extrasolar planets. The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes [...]