Got words? Share them! (© Konstantinos Kokkinis | Dreamstime.com)

To have a true community, two-way (and sometimes twenty-way!) conversation is required. The same is also true of scientific collaboration. Throughout history, major breakthroughs have pivoted on the right people meeting, talking, and combining great ideas. Your next conversation could lead to CosmoQuest’s next big idea. Click over and talk about the science you’re doing, the ways you’re thinking of using CosmoQuest to engage others in astronomy, and help us brainstorm the future and chat about tonight’s weather.

Visit the CosmoQuest Forum

Now, CosmoQuest is a lot of things, but we’re not everything. We are citizen science. We are astronomy education and outreach. By necessity, we’re new media programmers and users, and social media consumers and communicators. We’re a lot of things, and we want to talk about all things. Really, I think if it’s G-rated (& sometimes PG-rated), it might come up here somewhere. For instance: Bacon. Who doesn’t want to talk about their love of or aversion to bacon? And don’t forget all the great lithographs we have thanks to STScI’s G. Bacon. I think I could happily talk about the science behind Bacon’s images all day long.

See this image? It was made by Bacon. (credit: NASA, ESA, RAS, UCL, G Bacon (STScI), D Durda, A McLatchie & S Girard)

All joking aside, we have built a place for you to talk, collaborate and build a community, but we know we are just one of many online communities, and for somethings you are better off going else where. Below are some sites we’d like to recommend for the moments when you need a little more than our members can offer:

• What to talk about news, debunking conspiracies, & astronomy beyond the mainstream? Check out the Bad Astronomy – Universe Today Forum
• Interested in exploring the raw data from unmanned space probes? Get help and learn more on the UnmannedSpaceFlight Forum
• Cameras and Binos and ‘Scopes, oh my! Learn about all the gear and how best to use it on the Cloudy Nights Forums

Any thing else? We’re game. (Especially if it involves Bacon)

Let’s get talking: Forum