Beyond star parties and sidewalk astronomy, I use the web and social media to share my images and what I've learned about astronomy and astrophotography. Flickr, FaceBook, Yahoo, Cloudy Nights, DP Review, and the not so bad Astro website have overlapping roles.

After lurking on Quora for several years, I gave it a real try this past month. Content on Quora is driven by the questions of others. Some of the questions, I have ready answers for, or a different point of view. Other questions are just interesting to think about and I get a chance to learn something new.

I like to measure progress and impact; Quora has good tools for that. Here are the results from the last 30 days:

My answers to astrophotography and astronomy related questions were read over 100,000 times on Quara. This compares very well to the 50,000+ reads and views on the web site, Flickr, and Facebook in the same period.

I'm Rob Pettengill on Quora. Some of what I've written there has made it back to this site and vice versa. I expect my content to continue to flow both ways in the future.

Not so bad Astro will continue to be my main focus. I have control over every detail of the site and want to own my content. I'll also continue to reach out in other venues, where I can be effective in sharing images, knowledge, and experiences with others.