Follow my job search: Do I get inside or am I left giving my presentation outside the door?

I invite you to follow my job search in astronomy.

This week, you can follow: Do I get inside the conference, or am I left holding signs begging at the door? More important, do I get to join the research groups that produce the papers needed to get a job in science?

After the conference, follow me on whether I get to join writing the papers that I have been kept out from doing. Follow whether I get to join the collaborations that have not let me in due to LCOGT keeping me out, starting with TESS and Kepler.

I am taking my Campaign for Participation to twitter, where I hope you will retweet me. I'm in my 7th of being kept out, but being outside the door represents being kept out of not just LCOGT, but kept out of the collaborations with groups like Kepler, TESS, and the Palomar Transient Factory that I was the first astronomer at LCOGT to prepare our observatory to join.

In order to get another job, I need papers, and for papers, I need collaborators to “Go around the observatory” and bring me into groups writing papers that I was poised to join when LCOGT unexpectedly forced me to leave after seeing signs of me having a disability. I have been asking Kepler, TESS, and other groups to give me the chance I have been working hard for. (I do thank WASP for starting to work with me in 2010 based on that I had contributed to LCOGT data that it was not sharing with me, but I feel Kepler and TESS should bring me “inside the door” just like WASP was willing to.) True, I now have more expertise on planet distributions than from the photometry work I had been doing with LCOGT since 2005 since LCOGT gives global telescope data to these groups before allowing me, the first astronomer actually working at LCOGT telescopes, to see it.

The greatest victory from a paper, though, is getting one from the project I have done all by myself – though I would like collaborating co-authors. Currently, that is getting a paper done on planet distributions. I've tried several times to publish in this new area that I have tried to develop as a replacement to doing the photometry I was doing in LCOGT, but starting over in a new area home alone with no support has really been tough. Being thrown out is extremely disabling to anyone's concentration, and not being allowed to stay with the same research has disrupted my concentration worse. So I am grateful for all the encouragement people can give.

I am still looking for trip sponsors using crowdfunding by asking people to share this blog with this new "Let me inside" URL shortener to my Indiegogo crowdfunding:  http://tinyurl.com/letmeinside .

I hope that I am not kept outside for the last two days of the conference – but whether I get in or kept out, I will show you the pictures!