The October issue of Astronomy is in the hands of subscribers and hits newsstands next Tuesday. For readers, it means interesting new articles and amazing photographs; for me, it means the time has come to update Astronomy.com to reflect our new issue.
Updating the web site for each issue was a new responsibility given to me just two weeks ago. And while I consider myself pretty computer savvy, analyzing words on paper is definitely more of my strong suit (hence the job position of copy editor here at Astronomy). So obviously I was a little nervous to make my first go at it.
Three days later, the site is all updated. Yes, three days. It takes that long to get every image, every headline, every story, every link ready to reflect a new issue at Astronomy — or a least it took me that long to complete the task while not falling behind on my other responsibilities at the magazine. And that’s not even writing the content, just preparing it for the Web. Maybe I’ll be quicker next month, but I will say it is definitely more time-consuming than it might seem.
With that said, I’d like to commend all those amateur astronomers out there who keep up their own personal web sites to display logs, astroimages, equipment advice, etc. People enjoy your work everyday, but they don’t always appreciate how much you put into bringing your web visitors what they want. On behalf of all of them, I say thank you.
Now that the site is updated, subscribers have exclusive access to October’s web extras. These include: behind-the-scenes images at Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies, taken by Senior Editor Michael E. Bakich; Contributing Editor Glenn Chaple’s recommendations for red-star reference web sites; more highlights in the constellation Cepheus from Contributing Editor Phil Harrington; and more.
So check out the October issue on Astronomy.com (my favorite part might seem small, but I like the “look inside” page flipper in the top left corner), let me know what you think of how we run things on the web site, and look for the new issue to be posted about this time each month. I’m shooting for 2½ days for the November issue.