What are the goals of this website?
High contrast imaging (HCI) is a hot topic in astronomy that incorporates different skills ranging from hardware handling, code writing and sharing to knowledge in optics and astronomical research. There are a number of different HCI testbeds out there that explore the technology that facilitates the detection of faint companions and circumstellar material. We have found that while progress from the different labs gets regularly published in papers and presented at conferences, it is currently hard to get an overview of what group is doing what and how they are doing it. Personal experience has shown us that this often leads to missed opportunities in learning from each other and failing to identify points of contact for collaborations. The aim of this initiative is to avoid reinventing the wheel and while we will depend on the expertise from our senior colleagues, we are aiming especially for more junior people in the field. Our intention is to share resources on a more practical level, ranging from sharing best coding practices to caveats during the installation of new hardware, which are all things that lead to the results being published, but usually don’t make it into the information being shared. We would like to provide a forum for discussion and learning, where information is exchanged more regularly, and provide a possibility of keeping track of who is doing what.
How do we want to accomplish these goals?
The concept of this project was anticipated as low maintenance, in which any person can provide updates when they have something to share that is not significant enough to publish classically as a scientific result, but could be a new approach to a problem occurring in HCI labs and testbeds. This website is intended to serve as the platform for this. Our initial idea was to use it for the following:
- Having static information about testbeds in the Testbeds section of the website, incentivizing updates every six months with an email reminder.
- Updating a News section with any sort of news contributors want to put out there. If you have a website or blog on which you post your own articles or news, this can be incorporated over an RSS feed.
- Organizing informal meetings at events like SPIE to talk about the “behind the scenes” of the individual working groups. No talks or major presentations are intended for this, and the aim is to incentivize the exchange of knowledge about doing things.
We want to hear from you!
For this reason, any feedback is highly appreciated, as well as ideas for the project and how to organize things, as well as people who want to join the organization and administration!