 Good morning. Okay, it's day five of AAAS. I have to say I like having five days. It spreads things out a bit more. I hope we go to a five-day schedule in the future, but today I am... Yesterday I did not get a lot of footage. I was very focused on my press release and getting those things done. This is the fourth winter meeting that I have done these daily vlogs, and so that's the first day that I have technically missed. And you know what? It's fine. Between a pandemic and remote work and kids and... It's fine. Today's the last day. I hope I can find some good people to talk to. I really hope I can find some good science talks to go to. First some coffee and maybe a quick shower. Welcome to day five. I'll call this late here. Rushing to a session. Also normal. One of the advantages of multi-wave-like polar imagery is that different wavelengths are sensitive to different temperature material along the line of sight. Let's look at the same streamlines on a composite image, infrared image of Orion. We can get a sense of the geography of the region. Big session this morning on stellar activity. If we assume these blue asymmetries were caused by prominent eruptions or cool mass injections, we can estimate the mass and kinetic energy of these ejections by fitting the line profile. I love that's still being used five years later. Damage to planets from such intense flares and from CMEs associated with them can irreversibly change or completely strip off planetary atmospheres. Ward Howard talking. I have known Ward now and worked with Ward for years. Really excited to see him graduating and looking for postdocs. We find temperatures as high as 42,000 Kelvin in our sample of every skip and test flares and increase the literature on emerald super flares that have time-resolved optical temperatures from about five to about 45 events. Even though we're still on the last day of the winter double ass, they're already thinking about the next summer double ass and trying to decide whether or not it's going to happen in person. The lead time on these events is really long. Like it takes it takes more than a year to have planned one of these events. The next summer double ass is scheduled to be in Anchorage, which I would love to go back to Anchorage. It's a really fun place to go, but is the world going to be ready for an in person meeting in less than six months? I wouldn't bet on it if I do think expanding the platforms, finding other ways to have interactivity would be really positive. I'd love to see a official double ass gather town during the summer meeting. I think that'd be really fun. I'm not an expert in creating these maps and these interfaces, but I spent a little time this week working on it. And this is definitely a platform that I'm going to encourage people to use in the next few months as we're all desperate for interactivity and interaction. And as you can see by this video, what happens is the planet comes across as usual in a transit. And if there happens to be a spot on the star, it shows up as a bump. So as it comes around again, you'll see the spot here causes this dramatic bump in the light curve. I love that's still being used five years later. Sparks would probably be the first space based observatory ever to use an automated dynamic exposure control. But first of all, so with Sparks, we really expect to get much, much better constraints on the UB Flare frequency distributions of M-Dwarfs. I was really excited to see a talk about Sparks, the CubeSat. I was on one of the design review panels for Sparks and in fact, I think I even have a Sparks sticker on my old laptop. It's a really cool program. I'm really excited to see this thing fly in a couple of years. This has been a great session. Okay, now something fun, a fashion show from StarTorialist. I love this already. I'm pretty sure I can't clear the soundtrack from this video, so it's pretty fun though. An amazing thing that Emily just reiterated that I totally agree with is that StarTorialist, like so many things, would not exist without the AA. Without these meetings and this community and these opportunities to interact. I love it. I love how this stuff gets invented. Okay, now off to the Strategic Assembly Town Hall led by Paula Scoti, who's a professor in my department and is now the president of the AAAS. There was a big windstorm and knocked out a bunch of people's power, including Paula's, and so they had to bump it to today. So this is interesting. This is like the business of the AAAS, which is part of the meeting. I like to go to these to stay informed about what's going on in the community. This is what it looks like right now. We seek a world where all people value and benefit from a scientific understanding of astronomy that enhances their connection to an enjoyment of the universe around us. This isn't terribly vlogable content. This is kind of an interesting discussion going on about the various roles that the AAAS, the society, the organization plays about its ability and responsibility to shape funding structures and diversity, equity, inclusion efforts. There's a lot going on here and it's difficult to unpack it all. I think the Zoom webinar format is a little difficult for us to have this discussion, though to be honest, I'm not sure these discussions go that much better in person when there's lots of weird power dynamics and large rooms and stuff. So I don't know. These kinds of discussions can be really hard to have. It's early afternoon and I need to swap back and let my partner work. I said I didn't get a video out yesterday, but I had a really good time. I will publish a version of that talk that I gave hopefully really soon. This meeting definitely checked a lot of the boxes of what a AAAS meeting should be. A ton of talks and presentations, press conferences, and like very specific town halls and meetings with the agencies and the society. There's a lot of like business of astronomy that happens during these meetings. And a lot of that went forward just fine on the digital platform and the virtual platform. And that was great. I think Debikowalski talked about that on this channel before the meeting, that there's some things that we do at the winter meeting just because that's where we have critical mass of people that maybe we can do virtually now. And some things unquestionably did not work as well. Socializing and hanging out was really hard. Total attendance at the hack day was pretty low because we couldn't just grab people and bring them in to join sort of organically. So, you know, things like that didn't work as well. And I heard time and again from exhibitors at the virtual booths that they had a really hard time getting traffic. And the big part of that is just the sort of workflow of going from the Slack to the V-Fairs to the chat to the Zoom link finally. So one, there's kind of a difficult workflow there. And people started getting around that by just posting Zoom links directly in the Slack, which I think is actually a good strategy. But it doesn't eliminate the other barrier, which is sometimes I don't know what booth I want to go to. And just clicking through random exhibitors trying to see, hey, what are you about? It is a lot more difficult in a virtual environment. And we didn't solve that problem. Now, I've talked about this gather town platform on this channel all week. I think this is a great platform. It's been a ton of fun. Every day I've had at least one unexpected conversation on that hack day gather that we created. I would love to see the gather town interface used in like the Cool Stars meeting that's coming up in a couple months. The business of astronomy was carried out this week. And that's a good thing. I gave a talk that I'm proud of. I had some good conversations. And in some small way, I was able to catch up with colleagues from around the country and even around the world. That's good. That's a good week. And frankly, during this pandemic, it's been a long time since I've had those kinds of engagements with anyone. So the fact that I had any this week was a huge blessing. And I'm really grateful for that. All right. That's it for me from WS237 virtual conference. I have really high hopes for seeing you all in person at WS239. That's supposed to be in Salt Lake City in 2022. For now, let me say thank you for watching these videos. Thank you for coming and hanging out in the gather town space. I hope to see you all virtually and in person really soon.