How to take part in Astronomy Twitter Journal Club meetings

To participate in the Astronomy Twitter Journal Club the first thing that you need to do is find the date and time of the next meeting on the Next Meeting page. You also need to download the paper – and then start reading!

During each meeting we need it to be simple for people to see all the tweets relating to the discussion. For this reason, all tweets should include the hashtag:

#astroJC

We can then use TweetChat to view all the #astroJC tweets together – and see what everyone is saying about the paper. Alternatively, you can use Twitter’s search functionality.

Even if you reply directly to someone participating in the meeting, please include the #astroJC hashtag.

People who follow you on Twitter may not appreciate getting bombarded by #astroJC tweets. To get around this problem we have created a short version of our @astronomyjc account. It is:

@_atjc

So, if you wish, you can send all your Tweets to @_atjc and your Twitter followers won’t see any of them. However, please still include the hashtag #astroJC if you chose to do this.

Note that if you use TweetChat to compose your tweets, it will automatically add the #astroJC hashtag.

We expect the meeting to last about an hour, but if you want to continue the discussion over the following hours or days, just carry on using the #astroJC hashtag. We will use a tool such as Storify or Chirpstory to collate tweets into one blog post once the discussion appears to have ended.