Monday, April 21, 2008

Join the PAM!

There is a nice project started by Julien Girard called wikiPAM, the idea behind this project is creating a wiki for the mexican astronomical community (the name comes from Proyectos Astronómicos Mexicanos, or Mexican Astronomical Projects). Anyone doing any sort of research in astronomy with a mexican group can get an account there and post their work.

This portal has a lot of potential, you can post your code (or modifications to it), your data, an announcement for your future projects... It seems to me like a wonderful tool for a grad student looking for a thesis project.

As far as I know it is possible to post there information only accessible to people in the same research group, so you can also use it to share confidential information to the rest of your group without anyone else seeing the data before it is made public.

There is also a portal for astronomical societies (i.e. amateur astronomers) in Mexico, it is called Cosmowiki. If you can read spanish look at this interesting account of the first mexican connection to internet that I found at cosmowiki, clearly showing its potential for outreach.

I conclude this small post inviting you to join this nice idea, you "only" need to be involved in research that somehow has the participation of the mexican astronomical community in it (for example having mexican astronomers in your group, or using mexican instrumentation like the LMT).

Monday, April 14, 2008

National astronomy meeting

Tomorrow starts the national astronomy meeting, this is the only event of the year when all the astronomical community meets in a single place and it's also a great occasion for seeing old friends from other institutions. I'll be participating with some of my work in regions of massive star formation.

Hopefully I'll be posting soon about the interesting stuff that emerges there.