What I learned from at the AAS

Today is the last day of the 217th AAS meeting, and I'm playing hookey as I am at this point saturated! I had hoped to spreed out my post about the meeting over several days, however I found at the end of the day I was exhausted and was much more interested in doing a whole lot of nothing than blogging. So, instead you get the quick and dirty bullet points on my take the whole thing.

• Women are definitely represented in Astronomy, and this includes some of the top positions. In fact though the diversity in general is not perfect, it is a lot more so than I expected, especially compared to Physics. (This topic probably deserves a post of it own one of these days)
• There is a limit to the number of poster/talks one can hear before it all turns into gibberish. Coffee, food and jumping jacks do help extend that limit.
  
• Volunteers at the conference are an interesting bunch; ranging from undergrads and grad students to amateur astronomers and retired techies.
• The best posters and talks in my opinion were not the ones that answered all the questions but left me with brand new ones. I especially liked the talk by Nathan Kaib on "Sedna and the Evolving Solar Neighborhood". Though I do admit solar system formation and Oort cloud is going to win before stars in my book almost any day! (Yes, personal bias.) BUT I was quite interested in a poster on planetary nebulae which is a topic I usually don't get overly excited about.
  
• Zodiacal light, here is a topic I hadn't really thought much about previously but now I will. (Though I have always thought space dust was cool)
  
• Space missions need more funding, there is some amazing science we could do if only we could get the budgeting.
• Education and outreach, both need more status.
• I'm a sucker for neutrinos (there was very little mentioned at the conference)... need to get back in gear with my own research.
  
• Volunteering was fun, but I wish I could have made it to more talks.Still I really enjoyed doing the tech support.
  
• All in all Astronomers are an interesting and friendly bunch.

And that is all for now, a bit jumbled of a list I admit. I'll try and be more coherent in the future! Also not sure why the photo looks so pixelated, it doesn't in the original (though it is a wee blurry as I was avoiding the flash as I didn't want to blind everyone).