AAS 227th Meetng in Orlando, Florida

I would say that I am fairly lucky to have a chance to join this year AAS meeting because not many first-year graduate students usually come to the meeting. My main goals for this meeting are attending my first "Astropy" workshop and presenting the progress of my current research project about finding galaxy clusters. The size and the scale of this meeting are completely different from my first scientific meeting I attended last year in Vietnam. There are more than ten sessions running at the same time covered not only all kinds of research topics in astrophysics from exoplanet to cosmology, but also public outreach and other astrophysics-related topics such as coding and writing papers. The conference could easily feel overwhelming as many events occur simultaneously. I can only write about the conference from my own perspective, and keep in mind that each one of us will have a totally different experience.

AAS 227th Meeting at Kissimmee, Florida

Non-Academic Events

Even though the Opening Reception for the conference starts on Monday evening, my first event at the conference started at 9am on Monday for a Python workshop. I had previously attended few workshops about Python program, but this is the first one that targeted specifically people working in astronomy. The organizers, which mainly consisted of astropy volunteers, started the workshop with an introduction about numpy and astropy. Astropy is a project of unifying all astro-related python packages into one package that can easily be distributed and implemented by astronomers everywhere. As more people got involved with the project, Astropy Project also became a community of astronomers who are interested in software to work together to promote and support the project. Throughout the workshop, I have learned different packages in Astropy, including:

1. Units and Quantities: a unified way of organizing different units and constants in astrophysics calculation
2. Table and QTable: a similar package as Pandas but with an ability to export in more formats such as aastex table.
3. Celestial Coordinates: a package that helps locating celestial objects and its relationship with other objects in the same area. 
4. WCS, modeling, and fitting: World Coordinate System Utilities (WCS) to help convert between pixel of the CCD to the position on the sky. 
5. Other astropy-related packages including Photutilis (Aperture: counting photons in different sections of the image & Image Segmentation: detecting sources from the image using a threshold/background level), Glue (Interactive visualization tool for scientific analysis) and Specview (Interactive visualization tool for viewing spectrograph). 

The organizer also provides a Github page for all the materials that we went through during the workshop for future reference.

Astropy: astrophysics package for Python

Apart from the Monday workshop, I also attended two non-scientific session during the conference, which are "How to write Code and Software" on Tuesday and "AAS Writing and Journal Workshop" on Wednesday. The main points for writing software workshop are code documentation (for future reference of your own code), code testing (for validating the software), and code management (version control with Github). After the talks, I created my goal to start documenting my codes seriously and also begin to use Github as a backup for all my scientific and non-scientific codes. You can check my Github page here.

Another workshops that I went to is about writing scientific papers, specifically writing for AAS. It was a great opportunity to learn about all new features that will be included with the newest version of AASTeX, AASTeX v6.0 such as figure set, column hiding and decimal alignment and other things like AAS Nova for research highlight for the journals and ORCiD. There are many other things that I learned during the conference that I have not had a chance to talk about it all here. There will be something for everyone at this conference.

Another non-academic talks about World Wide Telescope as a tool for researchers to use to analyzing the data. 

Academic Talks

Although there are many talks about other things related to working in an astrophysics community, the main goal for the conference is to share new results in the field with other people in the community. As this is my first time coming the AAS, I decided to attend all the plenary talks regarding the subjects in order to learn about every field in astrophysics. I started the conference with New Horizon with the latest results of Pluto by Alan Stern, then dynamics of celestial bodies by Smadar Noaz, Event Horizon Telescopes by Feryal Ozel, the overview of the cosmology by Marc Kamionkowski and David Spergel, NuSTAR mission by Fiona Harrison, Spitzer Space Telescope by Giovaani Fazio, Zwicky Transient Survey by Shrinivas Kulkarni, VERTAS and HAWC by Branda Dingus, planet formation by Ruth Murray-Clay, Satellite Galaxies by Keith Bechtol, and lastly the latest result from Planck by Jan Tauber. In addition, there are many graduate students and professors giving talks about the latest results for their research during the conference.

One of many plenary talks I attended during AAS Meeting by Shrinivas Kulkarni about Zwicky Transient Survey

Even though more than 90% of these talks have a very little association with my current research topic, it was still beneficial to attend such talks in order to expand my general knowledge of astrophysics and understand what other people are working on.

I will continue talking about my experience during the poster session and other things relating to the conference in the next post.