dotastronomy, day one

There were many good contributions in both the conference and the unconference parts on the first day of dotastronomy. One standout was Pössel's demo of the planetarium show in the dome of the Haus der Astronomie, where the meeting is being held. The projectors are digital and yet beautiful, and exceedingly high in dynamic range (much higher than any digital projector I know). Another standout was an unconference session on javascript, during which we argued about case studies; and a session on visualizaton, where we group-critiqued specific user-brought figures. The latter should be a part of every conference: Every conference should have a session in which the group gives feedback on particular figures and visualizations; it is a science betterizer. Robataille gave a nice talk about the astropy project (although he doesn't yet have a good answer to the question of how we should ensure that the contributors get citations for their contributions; that's a great problem to solve). Muench talked about ways to make data used in papers discoverable by others in the open-science Comedy of the Commons towards which we (all?) are working.