Attend the 2013 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union virtually

Next week is the annual Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), an enormous gathering of geoscientists of all varieties that occurs every year at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. They expect 22,000 attendees. Most are Earth scientists, but planetary sciences and solar physicists are represented too. The scientific program can be accessed here.

To be honest, I find AGU's size to be intimidating and exhausting. I much prefer smaller meetings like the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and the Division for Planetary Sciences annual meeting, where you stand a better chance of encountering people in the hallways for illuminating informal conversations. These just don't seem to happen at AGU. On the plus side, AGU is such a large meeting that the press room is always packed, so it provides a rare opportunity for me to meet many of my journalistic peers in person.

AGU is putting increasing effort into making it possible to attend some sessions virtually; here is a whole page full of planned webstreamed sessions. In order to attend a virtual session, you need to jump through a couple of hoops, pre-registering here and verifying your email address, then "buy" your free access using the promotion code AGU13.

The planetary science sessions to be livestreamed are as follows. They will also be available for on-demand viewing within 24 hours of filming. Ones listed as "on-demand only" will not be livestreamed. All times are Pacific (UTC-8).

• Mon 9 Dec 8:00-10:00: P11A. Mercury After Two Years of MESSENGER Orbital Observations I
• Mon 9 Dec 13:40-15:40: P13D. Mars Science Laboratory: Bradbury Landing through Yellowknife Bay I
• Mon 9 Dec 16:00-18:00: SH14B. Voyager Leaves the Helioshere? II
• Tue 10 Dec 8:00-10:00: NH21D. The Chelyabinsk Meteor Event I
• Tue 10 Dec 16:00-18:00: P24A. First Results of C/2012 S1 (ISON): Comet of the Century? I
• Wed 11 Dec 8:00-10:00: P31C. Dynamic Mars from Long-Term Observations I
• Wed 11 Dec 13:40-14:40: P33A. Shoemaker Lecture
• Wed 11 Dec 13:40-15:40: Understanding Planetary and Stellar Magnetic Fields l
• Wed 11 Dec 14:40-15:40: P33B. Whipple Lecture
• Thu 12 Dec 8:00-10:00: U41A. Big Data in the Earth and Space Sciences: The Real Challenges Are Accessibility and Usability
• Thu 12 Dec 9:00-10:00: P41B. Sagan Lecture
• Fri 13 Dec 8:00-10:00: SH51D. Propagation of Solar Wind Transients in the Inner Heliosphere and Implications for Future Missions II (On-Demand Only)
• Fri 13 Dec 10:20-12:20: SM52A. Decadal Challenges for Solar and Space Physics I (On-Demand Only)
• Fri 13 Dec 13:40-15:40: P53E. Enceladus: Little Moon, Big Possibilities II (On-Demand Only)

There is also a full schedule of press briefings planned, and they will be webstreamed. Here's the schedule of space science press briefings:

• Mon 8:00 - 9:00: First Results from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) Mission
• Mon 9:00 - 10:00: Update from Gale Crater: Results from the Mars Rover Curiosity
• Mon 13:30 - 14:30: Lessons From the Chelyabinsk Airburst
• Mon 14:30 - 15:30: Taking Landsat to the Extreme
• Tue 10:30 - 11:30: Science from Juno's Earth Flyby
• Tue 11:30 - 12:30: Dynamic Mars from Long-Term Observations
• Tue 13:30 - 14:30: The Battle of Fire and Ice: New Scientific Results from Comet ISON
• Wed 9:00 - 10:00: The Weak Solar Cycle and Its Consequences
• Thu 11:30 - 12:30: Titan as You've Never Seen it Before: New Results from the Cassini Mission to Saturn

As for me, I will be attending in person on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. Most of Monday and some of Tuesday will be taken up with Curiosity results. On Tuesday I also plan to attend the press briefings on Juno's Earth flyby, Mars, and comet ISON. On Friday I will be chairing a session on "The Era of Citizen Science: Intersection of Outreach, Scientific Research and Big Data." I'll post more about that next week. And Friday will wrap up with a session on Europa.

I'm sure I'll be Tweeting up a storm, and will try to compose a blog post or a few. Casey Dreier will be attending AGU all week, as will Mark Hilverda, so follow them, too. You can try following the hashtag #AGU13 but it will be a firehose of information. In the past, it has helped stem the flow for me to search Twitter using "#AGU13 -RT" to suppress retweets.