I'm Writing for Astrobites!

Back in October, a few days after I'd arrived in Australia and started getting set up at Swinburne, one of the first emails I received at my new university address was a notice sent around to all students that applications for writing for Astrobites were now open. Never having heard of Astrobites, I checked it out and discovered that it's a blog collectively run by a diverse assortment of mostly graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics whose dual purpose is to 1) let grad students gain writing experience, primarily through its most common type of post, a daily summary of a scientific paper written at an undergraduate level (though more general posts on research, astronomy in general, and the graduate student experience are common), and 2) serve as a resource for undergraduate students to help them better understand what's going on in the world of astronomy by making important discoveries and concepts easier to understand.

Since distilling scientific concepts into (hopefully) easier-to-understand forms is something I've been doing sporadically on this blog for the past—wow, seven years‽ Has it really been that long?—anyway, since that's something I already enjoy doing from time to time, I applied and sent in a sample post in the style of Astrobites for the dealine mid-November, and this week I heard back from the hiring committee that I'd been accepted as a new writer! (You can find the official post that came out today detailing new authors here.)

Usually most writers work for a period of two years (though this is not formally set and can vary), both producing a post of their own and editing another author's post each month. As far as I can tell from the list of past authors there hasn't been anyone from Swinbune before, so I'm blazing a bit of a new trail here. The schedule for next month (which I'll be on) should come out this week, so I can start working on my first official post! (I'll probably use the sample post I submitted, though given another editing pass as I wasn't entirely happy with it even after spending several days working on it.)

Anyway, I'll link to my posts when they come out on Astrobites so you can hopefully look forward to monthly paper summaries from me for the next few years! A hui hou!

Edit: Also, just for fun, we had a hail storm this evening after I got home with hail up to the size of grapes coming down for a few minutes. Never a dull moment in Melbourne!

Clothespin for scale.