Guides

Are you mixed up by which scattering processes are relevant at different wavelength regimes? Don’t know the difference between type Ib and IIb supernovae? Can’t remember the distinction between ULIRGs, DOGs, and SMGs? Need some information on common telescopes or software astronomers use? If so, welcome to Astrobites Guides! Here we seek to distill fundamental ideas and information into helpful, jargon-free reviews. Is there a topic you would like to have a Guide for? Get in touch!

Also check out Astrobetter and the Astrobetter Wiki for more helpful tips!

Table of Contents:

Science (top)

  1. Everything you need to know for your first in-person observing run!
  2. BOINC: How You Can Contribute to Scientific Research Without Doing Anything
  3. Guide to Gravitational Waves
  4. Guide to Adaptive Optics
  5. Guide to the Electromagnetic Spectrum in Astronomy (NEW | OLD)
  6. Guide to Transient Astronomy
  7. Astrobites Guide to Polarimetry
  8. Classifying Supernovae
  9. Guide to Empirical Velocity Laws
  10. A Tour of Solar System Magnetospheres
  11. Getting Started in Sonification
  12. Blasts from the Past: How Astronomers Measure Echoes in Space
  13. The Radial Velocity Method: Current and Future Prospects
  14. Toothpaste Comes From Neutrinos: The Origin of Stuff
  15. Gravitational Lensing in the Canary Islands
  16. Stuff Hitting Jupiter: A Retrospective
  17. Let’s Lasso Us Some Space Rocks: Asteroid Mining And You
  18. Inelastic Dark Matter Ruled Out?
  19. 6 Real Planets That Put Science Fiction (And Cracked) To Shame
  20. Wishy-Washy Water World
  21. Classifying Civilisations: An Introduction to the Kardashev Scale
  22. Chury – a rubber duck with animal like characteristics
  23. Terrestrial analogs: A slice of Mars in your own backyard

Life Advice (top)

  1. Brave New World: Starting a PhD in a New Country
  2. Overcoming the Imposter Syndrome
  3. Managing Your Personal Finances In Grad School (and BEYOND)
  4. What Does “Success” Mean to You?
  5. Taking Care with Self-Care
  6. How to Be a Human Being: a Lesson I Learned from the South Side Science Festival
  7. Get those monkeys off your back!
  8. You should get Twitter…for science!

Graduate School (top)

PhD Life (top)

  1. Take Note: Building Your Note-Taking Skills!
  2. Overwhelmed with Grad School Decisions? Here are the Most Important Questions to Ask!
  3. Practical tips for setting up a research project, or “Things I wish I had known when I started my PhD”: Part 1
  4. Practical tips for setting up a research project, or “Things I wish I had known when I started my PhD”: Part 2
  5. Tools for Reading Papers, Part 1
  6. Tools for Reading Papers, Part 2
  7. Tools for Reading Papers, Part 3
  8. Strategies for Forming Research Talk Questions
  9. Hello, world! Virtually welcoming new grad students

How to choose an advisor? (top)

  1. How to choose the right PhD advisor?
  2. Finding, Choosing, or Changing Advisors

Job Market (top)

  1. A Comprehensive Guide to the NASA FINESST award
  2. How to write an effective personal statement for grad application
  3. Job title: Researcher | Writing skills: required | Talent: optional
  4. A guide to applying to astro postdocs. Part 1: Finding postdocs
  5. A guide to applying to astro postdocs. Part 2: The application process
  6. Drop It Like It’s Biased: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dropping the GRE
  7. List of Major US Fellowships for Astronomy Students

Communication (top)

  1. What’s a preprint, and how do I use it?
  2. Outreach for Astronomers: Skype a Scientist and Dark Skies, Bright Kids
  3. How to Be a Human Being: a Lesson I Learned from the South Side Science Festival
  4. Effective Science Communication
  5. Fixing academic posters: the #BetterPoster approach
  6. Astrobites at SciAccess 2021: Making your Poster Presentations Accessible for All
  7. Speak your science: How to give a better conference talk, Part 1
  8. Speak your science: How to give a better conference talk, Part 2
  9. Speak your science: How to give a better conference talk, Part 3
  10. How to successfully start and run a journal club
  11. How TAs Make a Difference in the Classroom
  12. Illuminating teaching, and the art of going where you want to go

Statistics (top)

  1. Beyond Chi-Squared: An Introduction to Correlated Noise
  2. Your Gateway to the Bayesian Realm
  3. Astrostatistics: How to fit a model to data
  4. Biases in Astronomy: Is the M-sigma relation an upper limit?

Software (top)

  1. Git Started: A guide to using version control in your projects
  2. Notebooks For All: Making Jupyter Notebooks More Accessible
  3. Cloud computing for (observational) astronomy
  4. Learning more about exoplanet orbits using orbitize!
  5. Getting Started with LaTeX
  6. The Problem of Exascale Computing
  7. Towards better research code and software

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (top)

  1. Grad Student Unions 101
  2. #BlackInAstro: Black Women in Astronomy and Physics
  3. #BlackInAstro: Black Representation in Astro/Physics and the Impact of Discrimination
  4. #BlackInAstro: How Can We Support Black Astronomers?
  5. Accountability within Astrobites
  6. Beyond the Binary: Gender in Physics Education
  7. Introducing a New Series – Astrobiter: X
  8. Making your classroom accessible for diverse learners
  9. Astrobites at SciAccess2021
  10. Building an Inclusive Astronomy Community

Missions (top)

  1. The WISE way to deal with 2.7 million images: a public data release
  2. Kepler on Trial
  3. BEYOND: Space Missions To Look Forward To In the 2020s
  4. How NASA chooses its missions (and how you can help)

History (top)

  1. More than astronomy & astrophysics
  2. The Strange Naming Conventions of Astronomy
  3. BEYOND: Drama in the Heavens – The Legends of the Constellations

Policy (top)

  1. New page: Guide to science policy!
  2. Let’s talk about policy, baby
  1. Advisee to Advising (your first research student)
  2. Target-Centric Astronomy
  3. Introducing astro[sound]bites
  4. Astrobites: A Look back at 2016!
  5. 2012: My Favorite Doomsday Scenarios
  6. Astrobites 10 Year Anniversary Top 10 Countdown!
  7. A Guide to Undergraduate Research Summaries for Astrobites