AAS 233 was last week, right here in Seattle! This meant that a whole heap of awesome current/former members of the UW Massive Stars research group presented talks or posters including:

• Current USNA faculty member and former UW postdoc Jamie Lomax presented a poster on High Contrast Coronagraphic Imaging of Two RSG Stars.
• Current University of Arkansas postdoc and recent UW PhD Kristen Garofali gave a talk on A Candidate Colliding-Wind Binary in M33.
• Grad student Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein presented a poster on Measuring the Massive Star Binary Fraction with Stellar Population Diagnostics.
• Grad student Kathryn Neugent presented a poster on Binary Red Supergiants: A New Method for Detecting B-type Companions.
• Harvard grad student and former UW undergrad Locke Patton presented a poster on Sonification of Transient Lightcurves: Supernovae Case Studies. Locke’s poster was awarded a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award in the grad category! You can also learn more about the project and listen to some of his sonified lightcurves here!
• UW undergrad Aislynn Wallach presented a poster on The Mass Transfer Geometry of V367 Cyg.
• UW undergrad Keyan Gootkin presented a poster on 13 Years of Spectropolarimetry of P Cygni.

I also kept busy at AAS: I spoke at a Thursday panel on holistic graduate admissions and gave the AAS education and public outreach talk for a couple hundred high school students from around WA state who came to visit the conference. I also spent several days gathering stories from colleagues for my upcoming popular science book, The Last Stargazers, on what it’s like to be an astronomer – I conducted my 100th interview for the book during the conference! As always, it was a whirlwind but fantastic week of astronomy 🙂