DPS: A summary

[beccastareyes]

So, I survived DPS. My poster went over well, and I got to meet a lot of Saturn rings people that I hadn't met before, and say hello to some people I had met before. I also have noticed that I'm a lot more confident about speaking in front of other people. Bit of a story there.

So, during the second Rings session, one of the radio science folks on Cassini gave an update on the size of the stuff in Saturn's Main Rings. I wanted to say during the Q and A session for that talk, 'hey, I have some results from the infrared spectrometer -- let's you and me and any other interested parties chat', since, you know, one of the purposes of one of these big meetings was to get people talking to one another. Unfortunately, I was a bit slow on the draw and the session was running behind*, so only one question got to be asked. And, unfortunately, that scientist ninja'd out of the conference after that, as family had come up from elsewhere in the Northeast, so he was mostly around to give his results in the morning. My advisor says I should email him a copy of my poster, so I'll get on that.

* Basically, unless you have the Moderator of Doom, a conference session will always run behind. Especially since giving a 7 minute talk, plus 3 minutes for questions and setup for the next talk is a very short time. And nothing short of turning off the mic seems to detract some people from speaking -- I've seen moderators pretty much go up to the speaker and LOOM until they shut up, and the speaker just blithely ignores them and goes on talking about aeolian bedforms on Titan or something. (Well, all right, I skipped the Titan talks, so I didn't see anyone talking about aeolian bedforms on Titan. But aeolian bedforms does sound like a suitably obscure geologic topic, since it's a precise way of saying 'dunes and dune-like objects'. And, yes, there is a reason why we say this and not 'sand dunes' -- mostly because geologists need to make precise distinctions about the exact shape and size of stuff created by wind and sand, while most people really don't care.)

Anyway, I also went to the Jovian and Saturnian satellites and attended a talk on the spectra of some of the inner satellites. I did get a chance to ask a question here -- mostly an observation that the spectra of the inner satellites had the same red slope that the rings' spectra did. I was a bit worried I'd stepped on some toes, since I know there are a couple of Italian scientists who are doing ring spectra work, and I didn't think to mention 'hey, they had a poster -- go talk to them'. (I'm going to be doing that work, but I haven't started yet.) And, then, last Thursday, I asked a question about the ages of helium white dwarfs during colloquium.

I'm taking this as a sign that I'm finally comfortable as a junior researcher enough to bring things up in groups larger than my research group, or ask questions when I don't understand something. Which is funny, since the people who really need to ask questions are people younger than me -- undergrads and early grad students -- but they are (and I was) afraid of either going over a point that is so general that everyone else knows it, or sounding like an idiot, or taking up too much time on a trivial matter. Then again, I've seen enough Ph. D.s who ask about stuff I've gotten to realize that there's never anything so general that you are the only one in the room who doesn't know it. Heck, I spent an afternoon on Wednesday listening to my advisor and the other rings professor at Cornell explain about Limblad resonances and a lot of math about orbital dynamics to another rings scientist, where most of it was caught up in minutiae. (After the week I had, I think I dozed through most of it unintentionally.)

I also got to see Britt, my advisor's old grad student again. She is a professor now at a small liberal arts college, and had brought a student to DPS. I heard some interesting things from her:

1. The difference between being a professor at a small liberal arts college and a professor at a research institution. She get a lot less time for research, since her main job is to teach astronomy classes. And part of that research time is spent instructing her Undergrad Minions about how to help, which is nice for the Undergrad Minions (and I say that as a former Undergrad Minion of a professor), but takes longer than doing it herself. Useful to know. (At coffee hour on Thursday, we and the other people at coffee also joked about finding a way to turn 'Helping With My Research' into a class on research methods -- Greg said he thought it would be shady, unless the class also got to be co-authors on any papers that came out of it.)

2. Britt mentioned teaching a class called 'Astronomy in the News', where she'd come up with a basic theme (like 'distance' or 'energy' or 'observations') and students would bring in astronomy articles and they'd discuss them with regards to the theme. Which allowed students to focus on the part of astronomy that they found interesting, be it black holes or Mars or whatever. She also mentioned making a list of all the things she wanted her students to get out of the class that didn't need to be taught in order, then having the students pick the order. Both methods were designed to get students to participate. Plus, the first idea attacks my two criteria for what students should get out of a non-major astronomy course:
a. How science works -- this will probably be the last science class they take, after all, and science does provide a general framework for critical thinking, which is useful for everyone.
b. That astronomy is cool, and totally worth the money we put into it.

3. 'The Astronomy is Cool' principle. Normally, in grants, we have to explain how our work is going to benefit mankind. At conferences, we don't bother -- because, we all know that we do this because learning about the universe is fricken cool. Britt's student was part of a small physics program at the college she went to, so she mostly talked to undergrads who were doing things like sociology and political science and biology work, who didn't quite get why measuring the F ring was important. And, you can say that Saturn's rings helps us with models about how rocks in disks work, which is important, since our Solar System came from a disk full of rocks. But, the average person sitting in on the rings session, or browsing posters, doesn't need to know that, because s/he probably just thinks 'rings are cool, and the more we know about them, the better'. Okay, a bit more scientific than that.

There is a big picture that astronomers do need to keep in mind -- how does My Project tie into the Vast Set of Knowledge about This Object, which ties into Planetary Astronomy as a whole. My advisor is careful to make sure I don't get stuck in a kind of tunnel vision, where I forget why I am trying so hard to model X or reduce data set Y. But, that is slightly different than how our work benefits humanity -- generally, the statement is that basic research benefits humanity because more knowledge about the universe and how it works is preferable than less, and if you can't grasp that, we probably can't convince you why our little projects are important by tying them into a bigger picture.