Hundreds of astronomers are soon to assemble in Anchorage, AK, for the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The AAS Publishing team looks forward to connecting with meeting attendees, and you can find various members of the publishing and journals’ editorial staff at the AAS booth in the Exhibit Hall in the Dena’ina Civic & Convention Center. Ethan Vishniac (AAS Journals Editor in Chief) and Frank Timmes (Associate Editor in Chief and Lead Editor of the High Energy Phenomena and Fundamental Physics research corridor) will be available at the booth throughout the week, and Kerry Kroffe (AAS Director of Scholarly Publishing) will be staffing the booth on Wednesday and Thursday. Be sure to stop by the AAS booth in the Exhibit Hall to say hello, chat about the journals, and pick up some swag! While the trio of AAS data editors won’t be present at this meeting, they’re just an email away; reach out to data-editors@aas.org to have your data questions answered.
AAS Nova Editor Kerry Hensley, AAS Media Fellow Lexi Gault, Astrobites Media Interns Lucas Brown and Maggie Verrico, and the rest of the Astrobites team will also be available periodically at the Astrobites booth in the Exhibit Hall, while AAS Nova Editor Susanna Kohler will be available via the AAS 246 Slack workspace. We look forward to seeing you there!
Open Science at AAS 246
Note: The links in this section take you to the corresponding entries in the AAS 246 block schedule. You must be logged in for the links to work correctly; otherwise, they will take you to the main block schedule page.
Looking to learn more about open science? Here are a few sessions to get you acquainted. On Tuesday, the oral session “Open Science & Computation, Data Handling, and Image Analysis” will be held from 10:00 to 11:30 am AKDT in the Dena’ina Civic & Convention Center, Tubughnenq’ 4. This session will cover everything from the sonification of galaxy images to enable aural classification of galaxies to a spectroscopic data reduction pipeline that is being tuned to process JWST data.
Wednesday’s oral session “Community and Profession,” held from 10:00 to 11:30 AKDT in Dena’ina Civic & Convention Center, Tubughnenq’ 4, will also cover a broad range of topics. Of particular interest are a discussion of the past successes and future plans of the multi-institution Solar wind with Hydrogen Ion charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics (SHIELD) DRIVE Science Center, which aims to advance our understanding of the heliosphere while broadening the heliospheric community; a presentation about the LightSound project, which continues to make solar eclipses more accessible to the blind and low-vision community; and an exploration of how the principles of architectural Universal Design can be used to make astronomy more accessible. This talk will include a description of how these principles can be applied to academic departments, conferences, and outreach and will offer guiding questions for departments wanting to become more accessible to those with disabilities.
Finally, on Thursday from 1:00 to 2:00 pm AKDT in the Dena’ina Civic & Convention Center Exhibit Hall, there will be a poster session on “Computation, Data Handling, Image Analysis.” These posters will focus on improving astronomical search algorithms, tools for background subtraction, high-precision image alignment, and more.