KIyer's research

.Astronomy 11 Recap

I had the opportunity to be a part of the 11th edition of .Astronomy over the past week. Apart from being my first unconference (where large parts of the schedule were left open for discussions and hacks proposed that morning), it introduced me to topics that I haven’t spent nearly enough time thinking about, including mentoring, outreach-vs-inreach (where you’re approaching people vs the other way around), inclusivity, the carbon footprints of conferences and the acknowledgement of indigenous contributions. A large part of the conference was also active on Twitter, which had previously been on the fringe of my radar at best. Seeing the amount of engagement that the astro community shows on the platform made me reconsider a bit.

The sessions had a roughly even split between topical astronomy talks ranging from adaptive optics and gravitational wave detectors to breakout sessions on how to use different plotting packages in python and addressing the problems with how science is portrayed in the media.

Hallo world?

I’m trying something new, shifting from vanilla html5up to Jekyll. This helps in a few areas: one is dynamic content updates, with the static blog-like format that Jekyll provides, along with a greater usage of markdown in the whole rendering process. My apologies if the website is less user-friendly for a while until I get all the kinks sorted out.