 It's midnight. I'm gonna need coffee in the morning. My kids are asleep. So you grind coffee down in the guest room Good morning. We are ten minutes away from getting the hack day started. It doesn't officially start until 9 a.m West Coast so because of time zones. I wanted to facilitate the hack day starting early So the East Coast people didn't waste their whole morning just waiting. So I'm up early with my coffee Now I have no idea what to expect today I hope we can replicate just even a small piece of the energy and I think the fun that we usually have So my only goal of the hack day this year is to make sure that everybody else has a good hack together conference coffee catering vibe I've got half of a donut and a banana for breakfast and a lot of coffee Okay, we've been hacking for about an hour hour and a half about a half dozen of us got up early We're spanned over many time zones, which is really cool So it was 6 a.m. Here for me and I think one person. It was 4 p.m. Truly an international effort very cool Our collective hack this morning so far has been playing with gather town Which is a platform for online video conferencing and chatting and hanging out and I think this is gonna be a cool platform for the day We're in a castle and my friend Daniela who astro vlog fans have met before on these double-ass vlogs even She put a dragon in because the good castle needs a dragon. This might be a fun platform for Emulating parts of the actual conference experience Well, I'm not super well prepared for this Said no who had fine. So I'm talking with Adam Bergasser who is a longtime collaborator and friend What are you doing at the meeting this week? I'm not presenting but my students are presenting but I'm also ready for VP So I figured it'd be appropriate for me to be present at the meeting I'm running for an office, you know, I had been a board trustee for a few years And it was actually quite Nice to to have some Role and how the society works and fun to address problems as you know as they do arise I think the meetings are one of the most important activity of us does to me It's an opportunity to kind of be involved in that in that process as I was preparing You know getting the block schedule out and sort of highlighting things that I wanted to go to I kept having that sort of very familiar sense of look just low-grade loss that you that I think became very Characteristic of 2020 you realize like oh, it's that time of year where I get to do that fun thing Oh, no, I guess I don't get to do that this year. Yeah, I think we do forget the importance Of those random social encounters or seeing people you haven't seen in in you know a year or two years. Yeah Yeah, that's that's really hard in this virtual environment. What do you think a successful double S is gonna be this year? You know, I think some of the things that we are seeing as successful is the Buried entry to these meetings is much lower We're seeing folks at the meeting that we know normally attend these meetings to me That's already a success But I think what will measure whether that was a true success, right? So you can have people who are you know showing up, but are they actually able to engage act? Are they able to make connections? Like science ideas, you know, one of the technologies I see that have been interesting and this happens a lot in teaching in particular And but also in meetings is that the chat feature has been Amazing, it's kind of the thing you want to do in one of these big talks is like, you know As the talks going on is have a little like side chat with your you know your colleagues It's something that could be replicated in a live meeting if we have you know some kind of virtual platform That's associated with it. I think we need to be gentle with ourselves and with others, right? This this is an unusual and remarkable time and you know some of us really are gonna have to get through this before we can Really get back to that level of productivity, and that's okay. Thank you so much, Adam Good luck with your hack and I hope you have a great meeting and good luck in your election. Thank you very much All right, it's lunch time time to get up and move got myself some fizzy water I've had a lot of coffee no surprise still have not eaten my banana. I have an office mate now So far I've been able to get a couple people on camera chatting about their hack day and I'm really enjoying this gather town environment I've got it up over here, and it's just it's just nice to it has the sense of being physically at the meeting So I'm gonna go back over here next to the dragon that Danielle left sit in my big cozy red chairs for my astro vlog And see if anybody wants to chat. I think it's going okay. I don't know if you're still here I see you sitting in the chair across from me on the My name is Linnea Volnevich, and I am a junior undergraduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder studying astrophysics, and this is your first hack day And you just submitted your first paper, which is incredible and Yeah, I'm very excited. It's called the stars Kepler mist and so essentially It's about the Kepler space telescope and looking back at the stars it chose from its CCDs using Gaia DR2 to identify stars it didn't choose to observe and then we Essentially looked for when it chose the stars whether it was biased in any way I love Kepler and I it was a huge transformative part of my career And so the fact that it's still I mean now 12 years or whatever after a launch still producing papers Is awesome and just such a testament to how cool the data is so that's great Was this a summer project that got turned into a paper or yes? Yeah, I got an internship or an RU Last summer with the University of Hawaii, which unfortunately is so excited to go live in Hawaii, but then But it's still culminated in a paper so that's good. So are you presenting at the meeting? What's your what's your double ass plan? I am I'm presenting on Tuesday like a little five minute talk about the About the paper and what do you think is next? You said you're a junior. Are you thinking about applying to grad schools thing about applying to jobs next? What's next? Yeah, what's next is grad school? I'm hoping to attend in data science actually instead of astrophysics and then hopefully in the future Come back to astrophysics with my data science knowledge Well, what is your advice or what would you have told yourself on your first? WS conference, I would definitely have told myself to come to the hack day. I think you all you already have like Exceeded my you know my expectations for my past self Going to the hack day is a great idea. Just it's something different It's my biggest advice is like just go go to at least one session We talk to somebody like it's easy to go to the plenaries and just watch big talks I'm like take notes and think big thoughts That's good, but like try to talk to somebody and that's gonna be doubly hard this week It's hard enough when you just have to like walk over to somebody and introduce yourself But like now you have to really go out of your way to like find a zoom room or something where you can you know Yeah, I don't really just want to come out of this and be like great I watched things on my computer right right because that's just every day right like every day We just watched stuff on our computer and yeah this this right here what we're doing right now This is the difference right yeah, and so far. That's what I like about this hack day workshop So I went to one yesterday, which was helpful because it taught things like are and such but You know you didn't really get to actually meet people. Thanks for chatting. Yeah, thank you wonderful to meet you I have no idea how editing this is gonna go tonight like it's an experiment folks. It's an experiment. It's a hack day It's an experiment Sounds great. So thanks for having us James. My name is God of color. I use he and his pronouns I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago and I've been writing with Astrobytes since January 2016 Hi, I'm Ellis Avalon. I use she her pronouns and I am a third-year grad student at the University of Hawaii I've been writing with Astrobytes for her since 2018. Okay, so you're both like Astrobytes pros at this point You both done with the project for a long time. How has the transition to virtual been? I mean, it's a virtual Publication, yeah, we've made a couple changes just to accommodate the chaos that was 2020 So now we have a regular like posting to our queue so that there's less pressure to Like have a post ready on a specific day, but otherwise it seems like the Great general collaboration structure hasn't changed a ton A lot of people would love to know how you get involved and what that process has been like for you You both have written now for years. You've got so much to do in a PhD. Why are you doing this writing thing on top of it? Let's go for it. Okay Yeah, so Astrobytes is a blog that is run entirely by graduate students. We write the posts we edit we Deal with the back end of the website And it's aimed to make astronomy research accessible to you underguides in the physical sciences and the general public And it's been a really excellent thing to be a part of Astrobytes is also like like for me been like a really great thing to be a part of because I'm not sure if I want to do like the Traditional research right after my PhD and this is giving me like like sort of building up a portfolio in that sense To get involved We have a hiring cycle every year. I'm usually around November December the application consists of a sample astrobyte and a Short personal essay. We also do guest posts often. So if you're interested in writing about a topic Reach out to us for undergrad as well We do guest posts where underguides can promote their research, but I think it really stuck me I think a couple of years ago when we wrote a white paper talking about our psychome approach For the decadal survey where I think all of us just came together and wrote about like what astrobytes means to us And it's I think the first thing that I remember was it's about like Bringing like scientists as humans to do science communication about what people like to talk about right Very recently. We just got a bunch of new collaborators who have created their own podcast called astro soundbites, which is exciting We we recently started an Instagram channel and I mean I just love the way everyone's bringing their best interest to the table and Just growing this collaboration in this very fascinating way I love it. I feel like it's gotten to the point where You know, like there's a handful of publications like this where you know You publish a paper and then you kind of you kind of hope it wait like will astrobytes feed You know, well, I get an astrobytes coverage is my is that I did I write something that's gonna be kind of fun And at that right audience, you know, not every paper is right for that Not every paper is gonna spark that kind of excitement with a bright audience But it's it's meant for people to read and it helps show the human story I so I'm really glad you said that and that's really great Astronomers are people too, which is not something I forget But which is something that I feel like a lot of the astronomy community does forget that like first and foremost We are people and then we're scientists Are you writing anything this week? Do you have your eyes on something already? Yeah, I'll be attending a few press conferences. I'm really excited about the one on stellar evolution If I remember correctly, you'll be in that one. Yeah evolving stars. I'm like, yeah, yes me like all right guys I will talk to you again at the wrap up Cheers, thanks All right, well, I'm learning a lot of technology right now How to like grab my screen and get the video working and the audio working like this is somebody's expertise But it is not my expertise. All right, I think I think I think that's a wrap up for the day What do you think buddy dog? Oh The gather town was a smashing success and I'm really excited I think start to list is gonna have their own gather town We might have a portal in ours and I think we're gonna keep it open And I'm willing to put up a little bit of money to make gather town available to the WS as a whole So if that's of interest to you, let me know The link is on the slack. I'll post it again. Thank you to everybody who showed up who brought their energy Who contributed? I know some of you couldn't stay the whole day. That's okay We understand that in 2020 and now 2021 you got to be flexible. So that's a wrap up for the hack day This is my day zero of double ass. I'll see you on Monday for day one plenary talks posters exhibitors I'm giving a talk in the afternoon. It should be a good time. See you