What do you want to read about?
About 13 months ago, I wrote a blog post about a peculiar binary star 375 light-years away called AR Scorpii. There are two components, a white dwarf and a red dwarf, and through the interaction of strong magnetic fields, the system produces synchrotron radiation — appearing like a slowly-rotating radio pulsar. It’s a rare object called an intermediate polar, and apparently a few other people thought it was just as awesome as I did.
So I kept writing. I continued to take a different tack from normal science writing by avoiding trying to blog about the latest astronomical discoveries. By focusing instead on older papers, I could look through years or decades of observations by many different astronomers, and I could write about whatever I wanted to, rather than the day’s press releases.
Starting this fall, my blog started to catch on, and now hundreds of people are reading my posts (which is awesome and scary at the same time!). Therefore, just like last summer, I’m going to try to connect with new readers. I’m writing more often now — hopefully, once a week for the foreseeable future. In recent months, I’ve covered everything from radio galaxies to our own galaxy, rogue globular clusters to rogue black holes, and everything in between. But I still have no idea what objects people are really interested in.
Most of my ideas come from papers I’m reading for a class or for research. A draft I have in the works was inspired by an image taken by Cassini in 2004 (see if you can guess what it is!):
I can only read so many papers, though — and really do want to engage with the people who will read what I write. The reason I’m sending this Letter, then, is to get feedback. What posts did you like? What posts did you think were too dull? Are there any objects you want me to write about (and yes, I’m still working on my one suggestion)?
Medium is designed to start dialogues, so let me start one with you. I’ve got tomorrow’s post almost finished, but there’s always a new week to write for. Let me know what you want to see from me, and I’ll do my best to make it happen.
Happy reading.
— Graham Doskoch
