AAS 233 // My Top-10 tips for new folks

With AAS 233 starting in just a couple days here in Seattle, here's a few tips for having a fun and successful week at your first astronomy conference.

What to wear? What should I bring? Which talks to go to?!  I remember having so many questions my first time... This will be my 12th winter AAS meeting (whoa!), so if you see me walking around w/ my camera - stop by and say hey!

 Be sure to SUBSCRIBE for more videos about AAS 233!

Stats from 1 Year of Vlogging

With this week's short video I have finished 1 YEAR of my Astro Vlog project! That's 54 videos, 6h 14m 29s of content published since Dec 2017. Wow....

Some other fun stats this year:
In total my videos have gained ~21k minutes of play time, from ~7200 unique views.

That's considerably lower than the traffic this website gets. Effectively If We Assume has been dormant (in the data-viz/exploration sense) for a couple years now. Note: I'm not abandoning this website, I'm just doing other projects like video right now! In its convalescence, ifweassume.com still gets a few hundred views a day on average (though much of it is automated/crawling)

Going old-school If We Assume for a moment, I really like this summary visualization (from here) of my viewing stats for the Astro Vlog project.

If you focus on the blue (Views per Video), it's probably fair (or optimistic) to call this "flat" at 50-100 views per video with a few outliers.

If we look at the YouTube analytics of Total Channel Views per Week, it appears much flatter over time.

Conclusion: My YouTube Channel is growing very slowly...

And that's OK! 

Would I love tons of views? Of course. When The United States of Starbucks or Airports of the World was getting press, it was great fun... but that was 6 years ago. I did weekly data exploration on If We Assume to feed my curiosity, learn, and engage with people. That's the exact same reason I'm continuing to make these YouTube videos.

Those blogging "successes" also taught me 3 important lessons:

1. Hustle/SEO/multi-platform connections are fairly important for attention growth.
2. Audience growth is usually not smooth, but rather impulsive due to "viral" content/events. Smash-hits are very important for growth.
3. Don't make fun content on the internet as a side-gig and expect massive growth. Doing this because it's fun is the MOST important thing!

Here is a brief reflection on Year 1 of the Astro Vlog project, and the 4 most important sentences I wrote in 2018...

Oh yeah, and be sure to Subscribe.

Coffee Time Video: Strange New Worlds

This week on the Astro Vlog I've published a fun chat with a fellow UW researcher and Star Trek fan, Michael Wong. His podcast "Strange New Worlds" explores the science depicted in Star Trek, and showcases his deeply respectable nerd cred.

We're talking about Star Trek, outreach/science communication, and our Top 3 Science-in-Star-Trek Moments

Check it out!

I discovered a mystery!

This week's Astro Vlog is a research update, where I share the results from my most recent paper (worked on during the Gaia DR2 Sprint this spring!). Most interestingly, we expected this paper to be a quick update to a previous paper I wrote after Gaia DR1. Instead, it has opened up a potentially exciting new area of research!

You never know when a plot you've made 1000 times before will surprise you - that's why you always make it with new data, and continue to examine it closely!!

Going LIVE (on Instagram)

Last week I did a 1-hour "IG Live" interview with @SpaceFactsWax, an Instagram space fan page run by Jonathan Wax. We talked about a wide range of things, from how I became an astronomer, to NASA's Kepler and TESS missions, to recommendations for scifi (Apollo 13 FTW!). This week's Astro Vlog features a couple highlights from that chat.



 To watch the full video, head over to Instagram!

Video Short: My Favorite Star

Spoiler: it's GJ 1243. No surprise, since this is the flare star I spent over 2 years studying for my PhD thesis!!

Video Short: have a life outside of work!

I don't subscribe to the "work 80 hours a week" thing... instead I like to go home at nigh!

write write write...

For the next couple weeks my big push is to write an NSF proposal. These grants are not easy to get (maybe 1 in 10 are selected)

Speaking at the GeekWire Summit

Last week I was invited to give an updated version of a talk that started out right here on my blog: The United States of Starbucks.

Six years later, I look back on this blog and particularly that blog post as a turning point for myself creatively and scientifically. It was the first real press I received for my work, and affirmation of my creative explorations of data.

This week's Astro Vlog discusses a bit of that history, and shows some scenes from the 2018 GeekWire Summit where I gave the updated talk:


And you can see my updated United States of Starbucks talk online now!

13 Hours

I did the 1-day-wonder trip: down to CA and back on the same day. A bit brutal on the sleeping schedule, but a great way to pop in and visit friends and colleagues at NASA Ames!

I was hanging out with folks in the Kepler/K2 office, unknowingly during one (what appears to be) of the final weeks of regular operations for the K2 observing campaign. Of course, science from this amazing platform is going to continue to be produced for next decade, so it was a real treat to get to sit in on an operations phone-con to see how each campaign of K2 is scheduled!

A new (school) year has begun!

I'm fully back from my August "hiatus", and now full-time working at UW.

This week on my Astro Vlog I'm reflecting on my own academic journey a bit, and looking forward to an exciting year.

Creativity in Music and Astronomy

My first video back from my August Hiatus, and we're talking with my brother-in-law, my "vlog-father", an accomplished musician and recording engineer/producer: David Miner.

We're talking about (as we often do IRL) creativity, mentorship, putting in "the work", and how the practices of creating music and science are often so similar.

One major takeaway from these types of cross-disciplinary chats for me is viewing astronomy as explicitly a creative subject, and approaching my workflow from a creative standpoint. That means the most important thing you can do each day is just create something, even if it's not very "creative".

Scenes & Voices from Cool Stars 20

Last week I was in Boston for the Cool Stars 20 meeting. Unlike the AAS meeting in January, I wasn't able to shoot a vlog episode each day - the meeting was just too busy and full of science!



I have two other Videos from this week. The first was the entire talk that I gave at the meeting, filmed on my own camera (I believe an official video of all talks will be posted later by the conference, which I'll link too of course). Check it out here:



The second is a "Coffee Time" video that will go live next week, where we discuss the Gender in Astronomy Talks project! Stay tuned for that...

Video: Top 5 Best & Worst things about astronomy

Kepler takes a nap

Today we got an email saying that NASA's amazing Kepler telescope, which I have used as the backbone of my research since at least 2013, was put into a "nap mode". The concern is a dropping fuel level, which you can read about here. This is likely the beginning of the end for the observational portion of the mission - though the science impact will continue to grow for the next decade!

Here's a short video with some thoughts on this mission and how it has changed my life!

Supernova Hunting!

What is it like to use a real astronomical observatory? In this week's Astro Vlog episode I am observing on the Apache Point Observatory's 3.5 meter telescope. This is a smaller telescope now'a'days, and its bigger than a house!

This facility also uses a remote observing technology, where through the magic of the internet I can control the telescope from my laptop in my pajamas. Tonight I'm using the telescope to follow up on supernova candidates found from the Zwicky Transient Facility... check it out!

The "Curve of Knowledge"

As a student I was worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with new ideas, or discover the Next Cool Thing!... I think a lot of people worry about that.

Honestly: I still worry that I don't have another "amazing" idea in me...


To help ease that fear as a PhD student, I jotted down a concept I called the "Curve of Knowledge". It works like this:

1. Come up with new ideas or notions for projects as they occur to you naturally
2. Spend a little time vetting the idea, making sure it's not obviously flawed
3. Look through the literature, assuming somebody already had this idea decades ago
4. When you inevitably find that the idea has been done, see what the date on the paper says.

As you practice coming up with ideas and growing in your domain knowledge, you'll notice in Step 4 that this offset shrinks. You'll start naturally coming up with ideas that have only recently been executed, maybe even being only a few weeks old! e.g. I've had new project ideas develop when Kepler data is released, only to have somebody else publish the paper a month later, before I can execute it

You could negatively view that outcome as being "scooped"... but instead I saw (and still see) it as an indicator that I have arrived at the cutting edge!

You also will notice that Step 1 becomes easier as you go. Ideas will more naturally come up as you gain experience. Creativity and idea generation are skills that you can practice and improve upon! Especially in science, you can practice them in a principled manner and get quantitively better at creativity!

Bonus: Old but not New, Forgotten Ideas

One thing I didn't mention in the video: sometimes when you're doing literature searches on projects you'll find that this idea was first outlined or speculated about 60 years ago, but the data/technology didn't exist then to execute it, and nobody has written about it since! If this occurs, proceed with the idea immediately! I have repeatedly come to the conclusion that I have no truly original ideas, but am satisfied with having ideas that have been forgotten by the community or haven't been considered for a couple generations.

You get triple bonus points from me if your original ideas cite 50-, 60-, even 70-year old papers that pseudo-scooped you, but nothing from 0-20 years ago!

Vlog: Gaia Sprint 2018 is a wrap!

Our remote Gaia Sprint here in Seattle was a great success! We had an average of about 12 people throughout the week, and a total of 22 people joined us throughout the week. Not bad for a quickly organized Sprint!

Here are some concluding thoughts on this event over coffee/tea with Dr. Daniela Huppenkothen on a Friday afternoon...

Video: Celebrating incredible student research projects

One of my absolute favorite events every spring is the student research presentations! At WWU we have "Scholar's Week", which includes two days of poster presentations from undergraduates in all departments.

This year TWO of my student collaborators presented excellent summaries of their work. In this episode of the ASTRO VLOG we're celebrating student research, and meeting some of these incredible young academics.

Video: Hiking down memory lane

I was recently home in Eastern Washington to celebrate Mother's day. Here's a short vlog of taking a hike up a hill and down memory lane. With a BONUS reel-to-reel player, complete with bootleg rock & roll from my uncle.