.Astronomy 8

Oxford, United Kingdom

20–23 June 2016 Pembroke College, Oxford University

The eighth .Astronomy conference was held at Pembroke College, Oxford. Organised by Becky Smethurst, an Oxford PhD student at the time, supported by Chris Lintott and Sarah Kendrew. This edition featured a Day 0 tutorials day following the success of its introduction at .Astronomy 7 in Sydney. The Hack Day took place on Wednesday 22nd June 2016. Topics covered open science in the Kepler missions, hardware hacking, citizen science, LSST data schools, the use of library archives in astronomy, and ESA Sky.

// organisers

Organisers

Becky Smethurst (Oxford, lead organiser)
Chris Lintott (Oxford)
Sarah Kendrew
Edward Gomez
Ruth Angus
Mark Richardson
Sandor Kruk
Ellen Schallig
Sam Vaughan

// talks

Talks

Invited Talks

Sarah Kendrew (ESA, STScI): JWST and Astronomy -- bringing JWST into the 21st century with better community tools — Discussed coordination with Astropy developers and the WebbCam live clean room feed. Science proposals opening November 2017.
Bruno Merin (ESA): ESASky -- a multi-mission interface — Demonstrated the whole-sky viewer serving data from GALEX, 2MASS, WISE, Herschel, Planck and more.
Carl Ferkinhoff (Winona State University): Open Source Hardware in Astronomy — The hardware.astronomy project: developing lower-cost instruments, involving undergrads, and creating open standards for astronomical hardware.
Ali Swanson (Oxford / Zooniverse): Citizen Science with the Zooniverse — Amateur consensus agrees with experts 97% of the time. Create your own project at zooniverse.org.
James Gilbert (Oxford): Gaffa tape and string: professional hardware hacking — How he prototyped a vacuum-based "Starbugs" fibre positioning system in days, proving the concept when the formal process had stalled. Lean prototypes win faith.
Geert Barentsen (NASA Ames): Open Science with K2 — Argued for radical openness: no proprietary data, no walls around large missions. K2's open approach produced more authors, more early-career researchers, and more publications than the closed Kepler mission with a 5x larger budget.

Lightning Talks

Aleks Scholz (University of St Andrews): #foundthem — SETI, open vs closed science, and communicating with the public
Ashley Villar (Harvard): astrobites.org — send your undergrads to Astrobites for advice, articles, and tutorials
Edward Gomez (Las Cumbres Observatory): There is no such thing as a stupid question — comic book for young astronomers
Coleman Krawczyk (University of Portsmouth): Astronomy projects for the blind and visually impaired — 3D printing galaxies as a tactile tool
Matthew Graham (Caltech/NOAO): NOAO Data Lab
Justyn Campbell-White (University of Kent): Classifying Stellar Bubbles — citizen science data in a PhD project
Adam Avison (ALMA): The Pynterferometer
William Roby (Caltech): A short history of JavaScript — ES6 and functional principles
Edward Gomez (Las Cumbres Observatory): Asteroid Day -- June 30th, 2016 — international NEA observation effort

Talks

Aleks Scholz: WETI: The Wait for Extraterrestrial Intelligence!

Contributors: Sarah Kendrew, Arna Karick, Demitri Muna, Scott Thomas, Lisa Ballard, Brian Cherinka, Philipp Plewa, Thomas Robitaille, Edward Gomez, Geert Barentsen. Topics: programming languages and tools, GitHub, web hosting, Flask, D3, web scraping, Django, argparse.

// hacks

Hacks

.draft

Andy Casey

Automagically highlight LaTeX differences between GitHub drafts.

Live

StingRA: Simbad Quick-Look Chrome Extension

Hugh Osborn, Jonathan Fay

A Chrome extension that lets astronomers highlight an astronomical object and open a quick-look pop-up of magnitudes, images, sky position, and links to SIMBAD and WorldWide Telescope.

Source Live

Are You Still Talking?

Edward Gomez

Use a blink(1) light to control your speakers when chairing a session. A Python package that installs a command-line talk timer, green while talking, orange in the warning period, red when time's up.

Source

arxiv59

Andy Casey

Twitter bot that posts papers which missed the top-of-the-arXiv deadline by about a second.

Source Live

The ArXiv Mailer

Dan Foreman-Mackey

An app to modernise the formatting of the daily arXiv email.

Source Live

AstroBadger

Matthew Kenworthy, Lisa Ballard

Getting you in the habit of writing 200 academic words per day, every day. Gamified writing! Chrome plugin plus Flask app.

Source

AstroGoldStars

Geert Barentsen, Kelle Cruz

Give a Gold Star to a fellow scientist by tweeting @username++ at @AstroGoldStars on Twitter. Solves credit sharing in science.

Source Live

bvi-sonification

Coleman Krawczyk, Jamie Ferguson, Andy Newsam, Adam Avison, Philipp Plewa

Uses a Leap Motion device to allow a user to listen to a galaxy's spectra based on hand position.

Source

Fakespeare

Ruth Angus, Dan Foreman-Mackey

A LSTM neural network trained on the corpus of all Shakespeare plays that can generate hilarious and nonsensical plays.

Source

Galaxy Zoo Maze

James Gilbert, Ricarda Beckman, Ellen Schallig, Becky Smethurst, Marten Veldthuis

Creates a responsive view of a Zooniverse subject and a QR code, then supports scanning and reacting to results.

Source Live

GitNL

Brett Andrews, Brian Cherinka, Erik Tollerud

Run Git commands using normal English sentences parsed with Google's natural language processor.

Source

Hacks Collector

Erik Tollerud, Daina Bouquin, Tom Robitaille, Edward Gomez, Becky Smethurst, Arna Karick

A way to archive all hacks made at .Astronomy conferences. Each hack has a separate YAML file containing all metadata.

Source Live

Markov Papers

Benjamin Pope

Generates paper titles/abstracts with a Markov chain trained on real papers returned by any ADS search keywords.

Source

Meta^4hack

Erik Tollerud, Daina Bouquin, Tom Robitaille

Metadata on a hack about metadata on hacks, the submission form for this hack list.

Source Live

Project Apollo Stories

Arna Karick, Sam Vaughan

A Zooniverse Project to re-create incredible stories from the Apollo missions using selected images from the Apollo Project Flickr gallery and Timeline JS.

Source Live

SIMBAD the Bot

Simon Murphy

Twitter bot that tweets a multi-wavelength animated GIF of a random SIMBAD object a few times a day.

Source Live

Spacebar

Scott Thomas

Astronomy-themed mini-games where you only need the spacebar. Keep rain out of the dome while observing, find the galaxies, and more.

Source Live

Stellar Autopsies Zooniverse

Adam A. Miller, Brigitta Sipocz, Ashley Villar

A Zooniverse Project to classify the light curves of dying stars.