Katie Merrell, AAS
What does an AAS Data Editor do?
What is the job of an American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals data editor? In four words: help authors publish data. When authors submit manuscripts to the AAS journals, our goal is to make sure the data products are as accessible, usable, and reproducible as possible. This effort includes creating standardized machine-readable versions of all extended tables, assisting authors with data/software repositories, ensuring proper data/software citations, and more. We perform an initial data review when the article is submitted (any comments are included with the first peer review report) and then curate the data when the article has been accepted for publication. Although these are the steps during the publication process in which we are officially involved, we encourage authors to contact us at any time via data-editors@aas.org. In addition, we would be happy to chat at the data editor’s help desk booth at the AAS 243 meeting!

Rahma Alfarsy, Univ. of Portsmouth
The Future of Reverberation Mapping
The study of light echoes maps the regions of gas in a Quasars environment and is known as Reverberation Mapping. Measuring the structure within compact Quasars at distances which cannot be resolved by current telescopes is invaluable to the calculation of black hole masses as well as advancing Quasar Cosmology. Traditionally, reverberation mapping required extensive high-cadence monitoring of individual Quasars. This meant that historically studies have focused on small samples of highly-variable low-redshift Active Galactic Nuclei limiting our understanding to a sub-population of Quasars. In this talk, I will outline a possible path for future reverberation mapping campaigns that could overcome previous observational constraints. It is designed for large spectroscopic surveys such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Survey (DESI). I discuss current tests for its feasibility as well as its potential use in extending the Hubble diagram to high redshifts by transforming Quasars into standardisable candles.