 If you find yourself parenting in the middle of a pandemic and try to drink your coffee, this Ember mug keeps your coffee warm all morning long. Good morning. It's the first full day of AAAS 237. We have two young kids and so I'm spending the morning watching the boys. Then I'll swap for a few hours and get to attend the conference. Then back to watching the boys. This is how work goes during a pandemic. There's a few sessions I'm really looking forward to. I'm giving an iPoster plus talk thing this afternoon which should be interesting. Today is all about figuring out how this meeting is gonna go. The iPoster is gonna be like, are people gonna show up to the gather town that we left open after hack day? Will I be able to trade on and off successfully and do childcare and conference? We shall see. Come with me and let's see how it goes. Now I need to find my coffee. All right, the first sessions are getting underway and having a couple of technical difficulties, I can't join the Zoom link. So I'm not sure what to make of that. All right, it turns out there's nothing wrong with the Zoom link. It's that the plenary talk was an hour ago. I think my brain needs to be rebooted. Oh man. Okay, so I missed the morning plenary that I was trying to go to by an hour because so I posted on the Slack asking if anybody else is having problems giving the poor tech support a heart attack only from my friend, Dr. Meredith Rawls to remind me that that was an hour ago and that so that was hilariously embarrassing already. So then I go to private message Meredith on Slack to commiserate about time zones in children and I messaged the wrong Meredith. So thank you to Meredith Hughes who patiently listened to my seemingly random complaints about time zones and wished me a better week. I hope it goes smoother than this. Okay, I managed to join some talks. It's how is a prototypical, which I would like to contrast as meaning boring, teatory star, right? Many of its parameters are what we actually usually use as the mean parameters for a typical teatory star when we're doing modeling. A talk from my former postdoc advisor and good friend, Kevin Covey. Cool talk, Kevin. Thank you for this cool system. I'm wondering if there's any value in doing a higher cadence monitoring of the system. Here's this little simulation that shows the surface of a red supergiant with its large convective cells and they have these episodic mass loss events like what we've seen with fatal juice recently. All right, well, that part of the conference experience is the same. I need more coffee. My goals today are threefold. One, I have to give a poster talk. I have double checked the time to make sure that I get it right. Number two is to try to figure out all the bits and pieces of the meeting, how to join the talks, how to meet the exhibitors and go to the various booths. You just figure all that out. I'm not gonna try to get all the booths in today. I think tomorrow's gonna be a better day to try to catch all the exhibitors. And then my third goal today, my goal every day is to chat with some people. I've been at the conference for an hour now and I haven't talked to anybody yet. There hasn't been a way to organically bump into people yet so I'm gonna need to like seek them out. How do we make that networking and that interaction happen? I don't know yet. Okay, Gather Town just had its first major win for me. I ran into somebody who I didn't know and I talked to them for just a minute and it was really nice. More of that please. My name is Emily Rice and I'm here to talk about Star Toy List which is the universe's premier Astro fashion blog turn shop. I like that, the universe's premier Astro fashion. We haven't been disproven yet so. So you're running the Booth Teak? Are you running it with, you're running with Kelly? Are you running it every single day, all five days of the meeting? Yes, yes. We started yesterday in Washington, DC in 2014. So seven years ago we really officially launched the blog. A couple of years after that we presented it as a poster at the AAAS on the education and public outreach sessions. Number one question we got asked was where do I buy stuff? Right. Which we did not anticipate. Luckily, Debbie Kowalski, who's the exhibits manager for the AAAS meeting told us that we could sell stuff at the meeting whether or not you put in thought into what you wear it does convey who you are and what you care about to the rest of the rest of the universe whether in person or virtual. Like every step, it feels like it hasn't been like, oh yes, we definitely have to do this. It's been like a very natural next step that's been propelled by the enthusiasm of our colleagues which is just, but overall it's our goal to just improve our experiences as professional astronomers. Help us express ourselves. Help us celebrate our science. Help us dress our press. Incorporate art and design and creativity into who we are and what we do as well. I think that's a really unique and important thing about StarTorialist, right? I've been to a few other conventions and conferences where selling things is a big component of what the Exhibitor Hall is about and what really, like a comic book convention, like it really is sales-driven. But this is a piece of that happening inside of a professional science conference and that's why I think it's so special that it's run by scientists that you are, I would say a scientist first just because I'm assuming that pays you more than the StarTorialist booth is paying you. One of the things that I really love about StarTorialist and DotAstro and The Hack Day, and I always appreciate that attitude of like let us build our community together. Like it is not just a community that you join and you just like are a passive part of, but like it only becomes good if we contribute and build things ourselves. And like that maker DIY mentality that we can build the community we want, I think I find that empowering and encouraging. Absolutely, and it's a really nice, I think the AstroPie calls it a duocracy. Yeah, yeah, duocracy. It's like, okay, whoever does it first kind of wins. Astronomy on Tap is very similar, like Astronomy on Tap and StarTorialist for me kind of developed along the same time and along the same lines weirdly enough. For people that don't know, I'm also the headquarters of Astronomy on Tap. Right, that's right. I think Astronomy on Tap started first and StarTorialist started as a little bit of DJ Carly Sagan's closet or stylist. So two more things that I wanna make sure to get on this video. You have webinar booth events going on. We're on Zoom, we're on Gather Town, we're on the V-Fairs platform for the conference. And we have two webinars coming up one on Wednesday. It's kind of an intro to AstroFashion. I've done that at a couple conferences before, but for the first time I'm really excited about this. And we're gonna try a virtual fashion show on Friday. 1.30 on Friday, East Coast time. Fashion show on the StarTorialist Zoom. And then the second thing is, and you just mentioned it, which I'm super excited about, is that StarTorialist set up a Gather Town, which again, going to that duocracy, do it yourself, just make it and they will come. It's a really fun place to just, if you're at the conference to run into a couple people, Emily has been there wandering around. I've run into you already. Yeah, I think I might be there right now. And I wanna say thanks to Laura Mayorga for setting all the Gather Town up for me. Thank you, Emily. Good luck with the Booth Teak and I look forward to the fashion show. Thank you. 1.30 on Friday, East Coast time. Part of today is turning into like, gym learning to use technology. So me catching the right time zone, clicking the right Zoom link, navigating the three or four platforms that we're using to make this conference happen. So it's happening in a lot of places and a lot of windows and it's easy to get lost and confused. Getting set up for our session, iPoster Plus session. So this is a five minute talk, but you have to use your poster for the talk. You can't use slides. So that's kind of interesting. Those are what's called Delta I, the difference in the heights of the primary and secondary maxima. NGC-3603A1 is in this galactic giant HG region, NGC-3603, and it's really exciting because it is the orbital mass record holder according to some spectroscopy from the VLT. This work found that the primary component was around 116 solar masses. For context, it's quite heavy because the previous orbital mass record holder was around 85 solar masses. Our next speaker is James Davenport. Jim, you ready? The stage is yours. Okay, so I'm going to talk to you about one particularly interesting system that's caught my eye over the last six or eight months. And this is a Cripsing binary known as HS Hydra. This has been a really fun project because it's been something we can work on in sort of a distributed manner over a distributed time during this pandemic. So I've been really happy to be working with a lot of really talented students from senior grad students to post-baccalaureate and undergrads. It's been a really wonderful human project, I think it's been special. All right, well, that five minute talk went just fine. This is now the third or fourth time I've given essentially this talk. So it's pretty smooth now. My review of the iPoster platform is not exceptionally high. My biggest problem is that the templates that they provide really encode sort of bad design practices which make posters hard to engage with. I think a lot of this can be fixed with improved templates. Moving forward, my other thought with the iPosters is that next year, when we're hopefully back in person, I would love to see double AS explore other options for this product, for this kind of experience. I would love to hear what you think. Put a comment or tweet me, let's have this discussion. Let's not just have unfocused snark, that's good too. Let's try to think constructively, what are the products and what are the properties of these products that we want? Just like my discussion with Emily Rice from the Star Toy list earlier, these meetings only get better if we engage. We have to create the meeting that we want. So if you have thoughts, please share them. Let me know. Tomorrow, I won't be giving any talks but I will be trying to find more people to talk to. My goal tomorrow is to engage with the exhibitors. There's a bunch of webinars and zoom rooms that I wanna be at and the last challenge is I have to edit this video tonight, so fingers crossed there. That's it for me for double AS 237 day one. Now I'm gonna go build some Legos.