Related papers: The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS…
Historically, astronomy has prioritized visuals to present information, with scientists and communicators overlooking the critical need to communicate astrophysics with blind or low-vision audiences and provide novel channels for sighted…
We take a fresh look at about 60 years of recommendations for US federal funding for astronomical and astrophysical facilities provided by seven survey committees at roughly 10-year intervals. It remains true that very roughly one third of…
The FITS file format has become the de facto standard for sharing, analyzing, and archiving astronomy data over the last four decades. FITS was adopted by astronomers in the early 1980s to overcome incompatibilities between operating…
The Astrophysics Source Code Library, started in 1999, has in the past three years grown from a repository for 40 codes to a registry of over 700 codes that are now indexed by ADS. What comes next? We examine the future of the ASCL, the…
Astronomy, as a field, has long encouraged the development of free, open digital infrastructure (e.g., National Research Council 2010, 2011). Examples range from simple scripts that enable individual scientific research, through software…
The future of astronomy is inextricably entwined with the care and feeding of astronomical data products. Community standards such as FITS and NDF have been instrumental in the success of numerous astronomy projects. Their very success…
Astronomy has a long history of acquiring, systematizing, and interpreting large quantities of data. Starting from the earliest sky atlases through the first major photographic sky surveys of the 20th century, this tradition is continuing…
In March of 2024 the AAS formed our Graduate Admissions Task Force (GATF), asking us to produce recommendations aimed at improving the state of graduate admissions in astronomy. The task was a timely one, as the past decade has seen…
A review of the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics Volume 52, 2014 (Ed. S.M. Faber, Ewine van Dishoeck, and John Kormendy) is given, with a perspective of understanding the current trends in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The impact…
The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), along with astronomy's journals and data centers (a collaboration dubbed URANIA), has developed a distributed on-line digital library which has become the dominant means by which astronomers search,…
In a series of two papers, we provide a comprehensive agenda of actions the American Astronomical Society (AAS) can take to create a more diverse and inclusive professional system for astronomers, with a focus on women astronomers. This…
Data analysis in space sciences has been performed exclusively visually for years, despite the fact that the largest amount of data belongs to non-visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. This, on the one hand, limits the study of…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
Science funding agencies (NASA, DOE, and NSF), the science community, and the US taxpayer have all benefited enormously from the several-decade series of National Academies Decadal Surveys. These Surveys are one of the primary means whereby…
Galaxy Surveys are enjoying a renaissance thanks to the advent of multi-object spectrographs on ground-based telescopes. The last 15 years have seen the fruits of this experimental advance, including the 2-degree Field Galaxy Redshift…
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Journals are a vital asset of our professional society. With the push towards open access, page charges are a viable and sustainable option for continuing to effectively fund and publish the AAS…
The Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) is a free online registry of research codes; it is indexed by ADS and Web of Science and has over 1300 code entries. Its entries are increasingly used to cite software; citations have been…
The 2020s will be the most data-rich decade of astronomy in history. As the scale and complexity of our surveys increase, the problem of scheduling becomes more critical. We must develop high-quality scheduling approaches, implement them as…
ADASS has been a successful conference series for 24 years. If it is to continue to be successful and relevant we need to ensure that it provides what we as a community need from an annual conference. Earlier this year the ADASS Program…
We briefly discuss the past, present, and future state of astronomical science with laser guide star adaptive optics (LGS AO). We present a tabulation of refereed science papers from LGS AO, amounting to a total of 23 publications as of May…