I ofter hear disparaging remarks about the virtual observatory (VO), or lack thereof, but things are definitely happening!

The scientific goal of the VO is to use a uniform set of queries enable astronomers to discover data sets worldwide and aggregate them into new data products and to perform new scientific analyses. The VO does this by developing standards and protocols to support common queries to disparate and inhomogenous data sets distributed across the globe, and by developing innovative ways of efficiently querying very large data sets.

Astronomy Computing has a nice article today briefly describing how three big (really big) projects are planning to manage and serve their data. It’s nice to see what the “VO” actually means in practical terms.

New Astronomy Projects Take Up The Virtual Observatory | Astronomy Computing Today.

It is time to look at iObserve again; since Cédric told us about it in September, I have used the App for three separate observing runs. So here is what I found out about iObserve as an end-user. In a few words, iObserve is a must-have for any observational astronomer. I would even recommend it for people who have been observing for years. iObserve is worth its $11.99 price tag (Free Demo) many times over.

My favorite part about iObserve was that it provided a platform aggregates (almost) all the information I  wanted about my targets. There was no need to open separate windows for my IDL-based airmass charts, for a webpage with SDSS finding charts, or for a webpage with my target list(s). All of them, and many other functionalities, were right there in the iObserve window. Obviously, all of this was well organized and easy to access.

This is a guest post from Rick White who is an astronomer at STScI. He is the Principal Investigator for MAST.  This is the first of a planned series of articles about using MAST.

The newly re-christened Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) is NASA’s archive center for ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared data. MAST includes data from 15 NASA telescopes. Active missions include Hubble, Kepler, GALEX and XMM-OM. We have data from many legacy missions and also host the Digitized Sky Survey and the Guide Star Catalogs. More than 1000 papers were published last year using MAST mission data, and a large majority of those papers were archival publications unrelated to the original proposal that collected the data.

MAST provides a variety of tools and interfaces for searching and retrieving data, many of which are probably already familiar to AstroBetter readers. These articles will describe some less widely known features of MAST. In future articles we’ll write about the Hubble Legacy Archive, GALEX and Kepler tools, community-contributed High Level Science Products, and the new MAST portal (scheduled for rollout at the May 2012 AAS meeting). We welcome suggestions for topics you’d like to see included.

MAST has custom search pages for all our different missions, and many of our users go directly to the Hubble data page.  You might not have noticed that there is a multi-mission search form right on the MAST home page. Put in a target name or position to search the data for all the MAST missions. You can download or preview data from the results page. Note that this multi-mission search limits the number of results returned for any particular instrument to 10 datasets, so pay attention to the note at the top that says “10 rows displayed, but 36 are available”.  If you click the title line for the results section (e.g., HST:ACS-IMAGE), it takes you to a search form that is already filled out for the target you requested. You can add additional constraints to the search if desired, then do Search to get the complete list of results.

The MAST form interfaces are convenient if you have only a few targets to search, but if you have a list of targets you’ll definitely want to use scripts. The MAST search functions are accessible through web services. MAST of course offers standard VO services including cone searches, simple image access and simple spectral access. The MAST services web page gives examples of the use of all these services.

But you might not realize that the MAST web services are much more flexible than the VO protocols. Hate XML and want the results as comma-separated values or in JSON? Add outputformat=CSV or outputformat=JSON to your query. Want to search using a target name instead of a position, or to use some old B1950 coordinates?  There are optional parameters for that. Want to do an all-sky HST data search restricted using the exposure time, filter, or start time, any of the other parameters available on the HST search form? Check out the list of mission-specific HST parameters.

Finally, you don’t have to start your search from a list of targets or observation characteristics.  The MAST Bibliography Search allows searches for papers that use MAST data; the HST Bibliography Search provides even more Hubble-specific options. Get a list of all the papers that have used ACS data (there are 2805 at this writing), or find the IUE papers with “radio” in the title. When you use this tool, the results include a Data link that lists the MAST datasets that were used and a link to the article in ADS. You can also search starting from ADS by requiring HST or IUE data links (which are provided to ADS by MAST), but the MAST interface provides more flexibility.

In the future we plan to use the paper titles and abstracts, along with proposal abstracts, to build a science keyword index for the MAST data. When coupled with data and publications from other missions and an onotolgy of astronomical terminology, this will enable a flexible and powerful interface to search for data based on scientific concepts (e.g., “gravitational lensing”) rather than specific targets.

This is a guest post by Dr. Jarita Holbrook, who often describes herself as an astrophysicist who went to the Dark Side.  Shortly after completing her doctorate, she dove into the world of the social sciences, quickly establishing expertise on indigenous astronomy. She moved to UCLA for her NSF project focused on studying underrepresented groups in astronomy and their career networks.

My goal is to make documentaries about minority astrophysicists who go to amazing places to collect data. I like to make films that challenge and broaden the standard astronomy documentary. I hope that I achieved this with my other documentary film ‘Hubble’s Diverse Universe’ and want to do it again with ‘Black Sun’, my new documentary project, which follows two African American astrophysicists: Hakeem Oluseyi and Alphonse Sterling. Both scientists study the solar atmosphere.

The climax of “Black Sun” will be their observations of the upcoming total solar eclipse in November 2012. My producer asked me, “What happens if the weather is bad?”  My answer, “They go home.”  Very dramatic, very high stakes, and success lasts only the length of totality: A little over two minutes. If the weather is good, there is tension because both scientists have to do their data collection in such a short amount of time.

The title, ‘Black Sun’, refers to the astronomical phenomena of total solar eclipses, however when spoken non-astronomers think the title is ‘Black Son’. As a filmmaker and astrophysicist, it has been fun to see people I know in astronomy documentaries, but few of those featured have been women or minorities. I take that back – there is usually ONE woman in every astronomy documentary. The women to be featured in ‘Black Sun’ are among the students who will be traveling with Hakeem and Alphonse to Australia, definitely more than one.

We have created a Kickstarter page for the project, which introduced me to the world of Kickstarter and ‘cloud’ funding.  Surprisingly, there are several astronomy related projects that have asked for funding through Kickstarter. To introduce audiences to the project and to Alphonse and Hakeem, we created a low-budget five-minute short video. Response has been positive to both of our promotional videos. The Kickstarter campaign is to raise funds for the first round of filming focused on Alphonse in Tokyo and the annular eclipse in May. Any funds raised above $10,000.00 will go towards filming both scientists, students, and the total solar eclipse in Australia. Please donate and encourage your friends and family to support this project!

More about the two scientists featured in “Black Sun”:

Hakeem Oluseyi is an assistant professor at the Florida Institute of Technology in Physics and Space Sciences. We worked together on the 2006 Total Solar Eclipse broadcast from Cape Coast, Ghana. See Hakeem in action in this short clip. We wrote an article about making the broadcast, “Total Solar Eclipse Coverage in Africa: Boundary Maintenance and the Control of ‘Image’ within the African American Scientific Community,” which will appear in the journal Critical Arts later this year. Also, Hakeem is one of the scientists featured in ‘Hubble’s Diverse Universe’.

Alphonse Sterling is a scientist at NASA Marshall. People outside of the Solar Astronomy community are unlikely to know Alphonse because he lives and works in Japan! He is the NASA liaison for the Hinode Satellite, a joint project with Japan.

In a previous post, we discussed the benefits of collaboratively writing papers and proposals.

Now, let’s talk tools to help you write collaboratively. This proposal season, I experimented with several different tools, and dragged my collaborators into the experiment. I tested out Google Docs (Kelle’s review),ScribTeX (Jane’s review), and Dropbox (Kelle’s review). There’s also ShareLaTeX, which I haven’t tried yet (Has anybody?  Please report!) So now I’d like to compare the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, and seek your feedback about what tools are working for you to get those proposals and papers written.

ScribTeX (Jane’s review):

Strengths:

• Easy to upload individual files or zipfiles containing whole projects.
• Good LaTeX compiler that fixes many problems.
• Supports two different LaTeX engines:  LaTeX and PdfLaTeX.
• Trivial to grab the whole project (for archiving, or to compile on your computer), using the Download button or a one-line Git command.
• Good at handling simultaneous editing.  Almost always successfully merges simultaneous edits, and if it can’t, shows you both versions and asks you to decide.

Weaknesses:

• not free (nor is my time).  $6/mo.

Google Docs (Kelle’s review)

Strengths:

• Beautiful support for collaborative editing.
• You can see what your colleagues are typing and pointing.
• Most people already use googledocs or google, so hopefully they won’t complain about having to register.
• Free.

Weaknesses:

• Telescopes don’t release proposal templates in this format. But they do release templates for Word and LaTeX. Should the community ask for GoogleDoc templates?
• Default template makes it hard to count pages against the page limits (ahem.)

Dropbox (Kelle’s review):

Strengths:

• Works for any filetype.
• Free for smallish size.
• Public folder makes it trivial to share files you want to share.
• Can share a folder with anyone willing to get an account.

Weaknesses:

• Dropbox is intolerant of simultaneous edits (because files are its atomic particle, not words.)  So it’s dangerous to simultaneously edit a Word file, for example. As such, better for back-and-forth collaboration, rather than collaborators working in parallel.

Version control: (Tom’s posts one, two, and three):

Strengths:

• Same toolkit can be used for sharing lots of other science products — codes, catalogs, data products.
• Free.
• Well-documented.

Weaknesses:

• Intolerant of simultaneous edits. As such, better for back-and-forth collaboration, rather than collaborators working in parallel.
• Different tools vary in how hard they are to learn. I’ve found Git quite easy.

So, AstroBetter readers, what are your comments? When have you found collaborative editing helpful? Are there hidden dangers? What strengths & weaknesses have we left out?

Inside Higher Ed has some interesting advice on whether advising someone to “be yourself” during an interview is the right approach. I found most of the recommendations in the article useful. But I would also counter that you shouldn’t pretend to be someone else.

• The ‘Be Yourself’ Myth – Inside Higher Ed

What do you think? How do you balance being “yourself” and your “professional persona”?

Good verbal communication is a valuable skill for a scientist. The article below discusses a common trait for many young scientists — rambling.

• Is That Your Final Answer? Or, Why Graduate Students Ramble - The Professor Is In

Do you hear yourself in those examples? How have you improved your question answering style? What advice do you have for interviewees?

Gregory Mace is a Graduate Student at UCLA. He is part of the team developing MOSFIRE (the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) and maintains the NIRSPEC Brown Dwarf Spectroscopic Survey online archive.

The next time you prepare for a conference and think of printing copies of the poster or taking individual frames from videos of simulations, consider using QR codes to link to this information.

QR (Quick Response) codes have turned up all over the web, poster advertisements, and in magazines. The QR code is a two-dimensional barcode that contains the pertinent information, which is easily read by a smartphone or tablet. This information might be contact information, a link to a webpage, event information, or map coordinates. Upon scanning the code, web links are opened without typing in the address, text is displayed, or emails are initiated. These interactions are also saved to histories on the phone and can be emailed to yourself for later reviewing.

All that you need to use a QR code is one of the hundreds of free reader apps available for the iPhone, iPad or Android devices. Creating a QR code is free at websites like qrstuff.com, which provides an array of content, color, and size options. Below are two QR codes that took less than a minute to make, the first (black) for theAstroBetter homepage, and the other (red) for APOD.

It will be a long time before we have electronic displays instead of tack boards. However, putting QR codes on posters and flyers provides a quick and simple way of merging printed materials with web and video content. The QR code below links to the UCLA Galactic Center Groups animation of stellar orbits in the central parsec of the Galaxy. Rather than a series of images strewn across a poster, the viewer can experience the full animation on their phone or tablet, while continuing to engage with the science being presented in the poster.

Although we can vastly increase the usability and content of our posters, we must also refrain from overuse of these codes to explode poster content beyond the size limits of the meeting. However, embedded links to references, contact information, animations and poster copies are all valid ways to reduce the clutter of your poster and focus on the science you are presenting.

How have you used QR codes?

Taking on yet another angle of related to our past discussions about posting to the arXiv before acceptance, citation etiquette, let’s talk about the peer review process.

Here are some articles describing the current peer review process:

• A quick guide to writing a solid peer review, PDF.
• Nature’s Peer Review Policy
• Refereeing Wiki Page

What’s your refereeing philosophy? Do you think there should be more guidelines to try to get more consistency in the reports? Or do you think the whole system should be more open?
I personally would like it be acceptable to post an early draft to a Facebook group (or a FB-like site) in order to solicit comments and discussion before submission. Please also share in the comments any links to resources you have found useful for guiding your refereeing philosophy.

Hannah Jang-Condell is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wyoming. She is also a member of the AAS Committee of the Status of Women in Astronomy, and is the blogger-in-chief of the Women in Astronomy Blog.

There are a lot of things you can do to boost your chances of career success but I want to tell you about something that made a huge difference in my life: peer mentoring.

Peer mentoring does not take the place of a traditional mentor-mentee relationship, but is, instead, a valuable additional resource you can turn to. I was in a group composed of four professionally ambitious academics with young children at home. The goals of the group include solving practical problems related to grant writing, productivity, and professional skills but also to address problems like imposter syndrome, isolation, bias, and work-life balance. Over the two years that we met, my peer mentoring group served as my sounding board, my conscience, and my cheerleader. In return, I fulfilled the same roles for my fellow group members. Our original group turned out to a victim of its own successes: we ended up parting ways when several of us moved across the country for tenure-track positions in science. Still, each of us is committed to creating new GPS groups in our new locations.

We called our group GPS, for “Goals and Problem Solving for Scientists,” and it did indeed help each of us navigate our way to career success. You can read more about our story in Science Careers, in this talk (PDF), and at gpsgroups.com. Our group was based on the group described in the book Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists, which tells the inspirational story of a professional problem solving group that lasted 25 years!

Consider creating a group of your own, especially if you are an early-career scientist. For more information read the Science Careers article, visit gpsgroups.com, and I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments.

Do you have a peer-mentoring success story? Share in the comments!