I’m enjoying a few weeks at home, a brief respite from the travelling life of a CosmoQuest post-doc. In truth, I love to travel, but it is nice to stay at home for a little while and get things done that don’t involve internet access. You know, like clean my apartment. Finish unpacking books from my move nine months ago. Cook something involving more than just the microwave. That sort of thing.

Where have we been? Well, after the winter holidays, Pamela Gay, Scott Lewis, and I headed off to the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in Long Beach. I was the first time that my “WonderTwin” Scott and I had interacted in real life since we met in Vegas back in July, so much silliness ensued as a result. Nevertheless, we had a productive meeting, stationed at the NASA Booth near their big video Hyperwall. Many astronomers, especially students, were eager to hear about what we are doing over here at CosmoQuest with our citizen science projects. We even made some connections that will lead to future projects on the site! Our buddies Tony Darnell and Alberto Conti were there as well, using the Google Hangouts to broadcast live and showing off some of the amazing scientific capabilities that the James Webb Space Telescope will have. Those videos have been posted over at Deep Astronomy, so do check that out.  Our Virtual Star Party buddy Thad Szabo was in attendance as well, giving a talk on his research into galaxy clusters. Good thing Scott had my SD card at some point, because he is faster at posting pictures online than I am.

Showing the CosmoQuest site to high school students attending the EPO event at AAS221.

Pamela gave a talk on CosmoQuest and where it stands one year after launch, and Scott and I presented posters on the various site statistics[pdf] and Virtual Star Party[pdf] which you may peruse at your leisure. On the last day of AAS, we had a new treat, Hack Day. Coming out of the dotAstronomy community, this one day “get together and be creative” spawned many nifty projects, including a 3D Mars rover video, new interface changes to WorldWide Telescope, updates to the very important “Mac Setup Guide” for astronomers, and more detailed over on AstroBetter, with links! My own video project, “Behind the Science” was filmed and eventually completed, as well as the very hilarious “Fund Me Maybe” music video. This whole event added an extra bit of awesome to an already busy meeting, so thanks to Kelle Cruz and Dave Hogg for putting it together!

Okay, so a few weeks later, Pamela and I packed our bags again and headed to Raleigh, North Carolina, for Science Online 2013, or #scio13. Continuing the “hack day” feel, this was an open conference with lots of amazing discussion sessions as well as a few big talks, such as one by our buddy Fraser Cain. In fact, we had a rather large contingent of the Weekly Space Hangout crew at the conference and, since the organizers had provided a generous internet connection, we ran a hangout right from the meeting. I am particularly excited that Fraser’s talk excited the #scio13 community about getting onto Google+ and using the Hangouts technology for science communication. Along those lines, the #scio14 planning wiki (that’s right, we’re getting ready for next year!) has a bi-weekly hangout series planned to continue the discussion we had at the conference.

I got yo hang out with Amy Shira Teitel! And she even brought some of her spacecraft models.

There were several discussion sessions about citizen science that Pamela and I were sure to attend to share our CosmoQuest experiences and learn what else is going on in the growing field. I can’t even tell you how many amazing citizen science project there are with all levels of activity. However, you can go to SciStarter and find all kinds of projects that fit your interests, whether it be planets, microbes, hedgehogs… yes, hedgehogs! (So cute!) I was introduced to one particular citizen science game called EyeWire that lets you map neural pathways in the brain AND get your gaming on at the same time. We talked about various ways that citizen science can be used to build community, which is an important goal that we have here at CosmoQuest. Along those lines, and in addition to the site data I collected for AAS, we plan to start surveying our users to get a feel for motivations and responses to the citizen science projects that we offer. Stay tuned for that! Lest we be all work and no play, I’ll let you know that there may or may not be video of me dancing with a lemur at #scio13. You know. For SCIENCE.

So what’s up next after this bit of a respite? We’ll be at SXSW along with the NASA carnival like thing… and I’ve included the promo video below. Also, I get to go to Chile to see the inauguration of the Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array, and I’ve already promised to “blog my little heart out” about the whole experience.

So maybe if you are in Austin you can come say hello?