QED, Starry Nights Full of Space-Editing... and T-shirts!

QEDcon

This past week, our own Susan Gerbic appeared at QEDcon in Manchester, England! Susan has spearheaded multiple projects, not the least is our Wikipedia user group, and she shared ideas for getting involved "beyond the choir."

Space!

For the most part, this update has a bit of a theme to it. Several members of our user community got really excited about the then-upcoming relaunch of Cosmos, and wanted to learn more about its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and some of the space-related enthusiasm he's generated. Additionally, we are also excited about the opportunities for citizen science participation in space and astronomy, as well as some of the folks who endeavor to perform educational outreach regarding that engagement.

Tyson's manned-spaceflight advocacy, including public speaking and testimony before the United States Senate, has inspired a nonprofit organization (Space Advocates) to launch a campaign, Penny4NASA, to advance a human-spaceflight agenda and the increasing of NASA's budget. In so doing, they've generated quite a bit of enthusiasm and a fair bit of coverage within the space enthusiast community.

Citizen science projects connect researchers with a wide user base and enable engaging educational and collaborative opportunities that are hard to imagine otherwise. As mentioned in a previous update, we performed a substantial expansion of Pamela Gay's biographical article, including newly sourced coverage of CosmoQuest, a citizen science community "bent on together advancing our understanding of the universe."

Editors Tad Callin and Kyle Hamar helped draft and support multimedia efforts on a brand new biographical article on Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society. Lakdawalla's research, educational outreach and coverage of all-things-planetary are worth checking out! On April 1 (April Fool's Day), the article was featured on Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." front page section, with a whimsical hook: "...that Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society has identified places where Martian drones can land on Earth?" (a playful April Fool's nod to her work evaluating Earth-based locations for testing Mars-bound UAV designs). This brought quite a few new viewers to the article (stats).

T-shirts