BashFest '11

During my first year of grad school at Texas the longtime director of McDonald Observatory, Frank Bash, was retiring. In his honor, they held a two-day conference where they invited promising post docs to give general review talks about the current state of their field. Everyone had so much fun that they decided to make it a biennial thing. And so, BashFest was born. (The real conference title is something like "New Horizons in Astronomy.") (The picture above is me sporting the official conference Tshirt. I like the design of it a lot. Way better than the shirt I have from the conference from 6 years ago.)

This year marks the 5th occurence of BashFest. Several months ago, I received an email inviting me to give a talk at this year's conference. It was both an honor and a bit overwhelming. My assigned topic was "late-type compact objects," in other words, white dwarfs. That's my dissertation topic, although I haven't really done anything new in that area in the last two years because my post doc work focused on other things.

I wanted to maximize my time in Austin, but couldn't really get away for too long because of my teaching schedule. So I flew out Friday afternoon. Had a great time seeing friends and eating good food. (Well, minus the UT/OU game. That was horrible. But the company was great!) Many thanks to R&W for letting me stay with them 2 nights! (And to their daughter E for being so cute and so much fun.)

Good food. Love Rudys creamed corn!


Also, I brought all the rain in Virginia with me to Texas. It rained so hard! It hasn't rained since like April. They really need the rain!


The conference had a small reception Sunday night and then was Monday and Tuesday. My talk was Monday afternoon. I kept putting off preparing it, and did most of the prep Sunday night, until my internet in the bed and breakfast I stayed in when out. Then I finished it up the next day during lunch. (We had a really long lunch break.)

I was the first talk after lunch. I liked the focus and theme of my talk: overview of stellar evolution and the creation of white dwarfs, and discussion of different white dwarf science in order of decreasing temperature: the hot ones, the medium-temperature ones, and the cool ones. I was feeling a little nervous before (I wanted to do a good job, and I'd worried a lot about whether or not I pitched my talk to the right level), but once I got up there, I totally relaxed.

Honestly, I feel like this was one of the best talks I've ever given. Maybe THE best one. It was so much fun! I felt like I was enthusiastic, informative, engaging, etc. In my introduction to stellar evolution, I showed the HR Diagram/color-magnitude diagram animation I got from JA at STScI. (I've mentioned it before on this blog, if you haven't seen it, watch it! It's super cool. Go here, watch about 9:15 to 12:45.) I knew people would love it and they did! After showing it, I got APPLAUSE in the middle of my talk!! That's a first for me for sure, and undoubtedly the last time it'll happen. (P.S. It never happens, astronomers are hard to move sometimes.) (Don't worry, I gave JA credit, for sure.) And everyone laughed at all my jokes, and I got some good questions at the end.

I felt terrific about how my talk went, and I got a lot of compliments! From fellow conference attendees, I got the following comments (among others):

• "Your talk was excellent!"
• "I loved your talk!"
• "Your talk was fantastic!" (- Frank Bash, namesake of the conference)
• "Your talk was fabulous!"
• "You talk was wonderful!"

(In addition to lots of people asking for a copy of the animation. I have to ask JA about that, since it's not really mine to distribute.)

Also, Rob Robinson, a former professor of mine, found me at lunch the next day to catch up and when I said I was teaching right now, he asked, "How are you liking teaching?" When I said I loved it, he said, "I can believe that. You just seemed to exude joy as you were talking yesterday. You can tell you love teaching." :)

Anyway, the conference was a great time, and I had to head back Tuesday night. I arrived at Dulles airport at 1:00am, back in Harrisonburg at 3:00am, and then had to teach at 8:00am! Yikes! And I think I caught a cold on the plane, which isn't awesome, but hopefully I'll get over it soon.

Oh, and I'm giving my physics class their second exam tomorrow morning. Yikes! Hope it goes better than last time! (The grade distribution on the last one was so broad, I ended up just curving it.)