Life as an Astronomer

This started out at as a little 'What I do for a Living' sort of page, but ballooned a bit. As a result, I've indexed everything; you can take the topics piecemeal or read this page as a whole. Mostly I'm just rambling, but you might enjoy the occasional insight here and there.

The Thrill of Discovery
Historical Aspect of Astronomy
Social Status
Astronomy or Astrophysics?
Publish or Perish
Tools of the Trade
The Educational Process
Travel
Observing Runs
Conferences
Why are my Web Pages Black?
Prospects for Careers in the Field
Special Aspects of Being an Astronomer

The Thrill of Discovery

Looking over the content of this page, I've noticed that it's a tad caustic - I was shooting for wry but maybe overshot in the direction of cynical. As such, I felt it was important to add something about how, to me, being an astronomer is truly thrilling. The lifestyle is indeed an adventure in terms of your activities, locales and acquaintances - typically all mixed together, too. Adrenaline is easily accessible, from doing gymnastics on telescope support structures to sending up a rocket into the cold clutches of outer space. However, the thrill of discovery is quite different than any of these other rushes, and puts enough butterflies in my stomach to fill the Astrodome. It's rare - thus far in my own life I can think of only two striking examples of true discovery - and quite unlike any other feeling. No one goes into astronomy for the money - but then again, this sort of thing you just can't buy, either. Astronomy as a field is blessed in that there are no shortage of worlds to explore and secrets to learn from the cosmos.

Historical Aspect of Astronomy

Astronomy is, of course, the oldest science. It's the granddaddy of 'em all - stars were being checked out long before the terms 'microeconomics' and 'macroeconomics' were invented. Ok, I know, that's not a fair comparison - economics is not a science. Developments in the field helped spur the Renaissance, create the scientific method and pretty much make the world what it is today; in a word, you have astronomy to thank for your microwave ovens and steel-belted radial tires.

Having such a rich legacy in the field is not without its downside, however. Many - it could be argued all - classification schemes for all sorts of astronomical objects were dreamed up by people who didn't understand what the hell they were talking about. Example - stars are classified by their spectra, a dissection of the light into its component colors. The original scheme started at A and went down from there - not bad, huh? Turns out, though, that "O" was the most appropriate spectrum to go first - but, as is commonplace in astronomy, the original classifications were kept. So now students of the field are forced to learn politically incorrect mnemonics to keep things straight ("OBAFGKM" doesn't really roll of the tongue.)

Social Status

People are always fascinated to learn that you are an astronomer. You are the intrepid astronomer, going to the ends of the earth to explore the depths of the heavens. Prying secrets from the very stars with extreme prejudice is a walk in the park; untangling riddles lurking in the hearts of galaxies is like taking candy from a baby. You grasp and bat about concepts that would stop a herd of water buffaloes - or stock brokers, both being functionally equivalent - in its tracks. Given our small numbers and well-cultivated mythos, eyes will always widen when you reveal your superhuman nature.

This fascination is especially evident in bars. Suddenly mere mortals have in front of them what they perceive the font of galactic wisdom - you, the professional astronomer. People have generally had a few, and in the process of tying one on, they feel that they can plumb the secrets of the universe - and you are their avenue for doing so. Questions from these sort of people run the range from insightful to incoherent, typically the latter, and generally involving questions about:

Most of these questions will be of only tangential interest to you, aside from what you've glanced over in the latest Sky & Telescope. Nevertheless, anything you say will be taken as the gospel truth - I don't recommend that you abuse this special power you possess, but with those particularly obnoxious and persistent bar flies it can be fun.

I believe that much of this unique status can be traced back to ancient times. Back then we weren't merely astronomers - we were the astronomer priests. Crops flourished or withered & died based upon what side of bed we got out of in the morning; vestal virgins were lavished upon us; affairs of state were directed based upon our interpretations of random events in the sky. Sure, tending to the eternal flame could be a real nuisance, but my guess is that it was no different then topping off dewars every 6 hours. Oh yeah, that heaven & hell thing - we called the shots on that too.

Ahh, here's to the good old days.

Astronomy or Astrophysics?

A common question - what's the difference? Well, none really, just semantics. Astronomy without physics is like pork without beans. Trying to make it in the field without kicking about Maxwell's equations or something of the same nature is attempting to make it as a highly misplaced photographer - it does happen, but about as often as you get an accountant who can't add. If you want to split hairs, I'd say that an astrophysicist is the person who can dazzle you with their theories about how the fabric of the cosmos is woven together. The astronomer is the fellow who comes off the mountain with actual data and proceeds to punch enough holes into those conjectures to make a colander look watertight by comparison.

Publish or Perish

An accurate statement, though the truth of it varies slightly with the application of tenure. Put out less than two or three papers a year and, well, you better be at a government facility. As far as actually getting tenure, the process was discontinued due to overwhelming success. The last person to receive the elusive golden ticket to permanent job security did so in 1937; at last word, he was still on the job, refusing to retire or even accept emeritus status.

Tools of the Trade

Computers - Bread and butter for anyone in science. These machines act to help collect data and also analyze it after the fact. Also, they are convienently littered about any scientific setting as easy targets to direct any necessary swearing at. By design, curses directed at these machines do indeed tend to make them perform better - this has been empirically established in my own experience a number of times, usually in conjunction with "Windows 95". Such a device can be both your best friend and worst enemy.

Cryogens - Highly sensitive detectors usually require operation at subzero temperatures, and cryogens are abundant at observatories. Some of the popular flavors:
Dry Ice - Solid carbon dioxide. Formerly very popular with photomultiplier tubes; it has fallen out of favor as of late.
Liquid Nitrogen - The favorite. Liter for liter, it's the same price as milk, it's good & cold (77 K), but not too much so - it's still pretty easy to handle.
Liquid Helium - Somewhat exotic. Very cold stuff - 4 K - makes it rather tricky (and dangerous!) to kick around; it's also somewhat expensive. However, certain instruments need to get down past LN2 temperatures, so liquid helium is not terribly uncommon.
Solid Hydrogen - VERY exotic. Used by the military in Star Wars satellites (check out the MSX mission for more information).

Electronics & Electrical Systems - Note that this is quite separate from 'Computers'. This subject comes in two flavors: digital and analog. Digital is simply Boolean algebra wrapped up into devices that you put together not quite unlike Legos - simple stuff. Analog, on the other hand, is black magic. There is roughly a dozen people in the world who truly understand analog; their leader is Paul Horowitz.

Optics - High quality astronomical optics can be a real pain in the ass to deal with. The stuff is difficult to align, impossible to clean (a task best avoided), and never ever perfect, regardless of how much money is spent on it. One is always left with the feeling that optical elements are never quite pointing in the right direction, that they're covered with just a little too much dust, and of course sporting better than a quarter wave of ripple across the surface. None of these suspicions, of course, can be ever resolved to your satisfaction.

Vacuum technology - Loads of the stuff. Playing with cryogens usually involves dewars; dewars are essentially giant Thermos bottles with the detectors inside. What make a Thermos work is its evacuated sleeve between its inside and outside worlds - no heat gets conducted. Dewars sport the same design and as such astronomers get quite familiar with maintaining such beasties. Note that vacuums mean pumps, pumps mean pipes, and pipes mean that you've suddenly become the world's most highly educated plumber. Unfortunately the pay is strikingly better if you stick to working on Maytags.

Fun stuff - As an observational astronomer, I've had to get proficient with some downright unusual items. For example:
Tucker Snow Cats - Going up - and down! - Jelm mountain road in the dead of winter, through six foot snow drifts is no task for even the beefiest of 4x4's. So running this four-tracked behemoth is a skill best developed at one's leisure, before it's needed in desperation.
Cranes - Even small telescopes tend to be ponderously heavy; installation of these instruments is beyond the capabilities of even a team of Navy Seals. Hence, heavy machinery often comes into play when dealing with observatories.
Exotic Materials - Sapphires and rubies can be found in jewelry stores, but they're also particularly useful crystalline structures when it comes to dealing with light. Other not so 'precious' (but equally expensive!) materials abound - my own experience is with fluorine derivatives, like calcium fluoride and magnesium fluoride.

The Educational Process

Undergraduate Education - We all start out as undergraduates - snotnosed little brats who are fascinated by pretty stars and oblivious to the amount of math we're about to indulge ourselves in. Little needs to be said about the undergraduate experience, except that remarkably few of us takes as many physics courses as we should.

Graduate Education - Welcome to hell. Graduate school is a process of being overworked and underpaid, just to see who wants it enough. Excellence is replaced by survival as the ultimate, elusive goal. There are two arenas of learning: classroom knowledge, and actual knowledge. The former will tend to concentrate on esoteric areas of physics that you will never ever use again after your comprehensive examinations; any useful content that might be contained in this phase of your education will more often than not be obviated by inept teaching. The latter arena is rife with topics that you never even knew existed but will learn to swear by - for example, IDL isn't listed in any curricula I know of, but you'd be hard pressed to find a department that hasn't shelled out the big bucks for the language.

Travel

One of the interesting aspects of being a professional astronomer is that it involves a great deal of travelling. So much so, actually, that at times I find it to be quite a burden. Racking up frequent flier miles is great, but it's small reward considering that you're locking yourself into giant buses with wings for hours on end. And for goodness sake, the reward? More of the same.

Typically travel falls into two categories - observing runs (data collection) and conferences (data presentation). For those high on the food chain, there is also travel to Washington, DC (getting money for collecting & presenting data).

Observing Runs

The Environment
You are a vassal of the weather. Its whim will dictate whether or not you're slaving away from dusk till dawn, or puttering around surfing the web. I have seen theses and dissertations take extra months and years merely due to stray stratocumuli.
Of course, observatories are typically mountaintop affairs in remote locations (at least, those of the infrared and visible flavors), which can make for spectacular surroundings. I have seen more fiery, vibrant sunsets - and sunrises - than a shuttle astronaut.
On these mountaintops, usually removed far from civilization, or at least your own neck of it, the weather can be especially extreme. Subzero temperatures further aggravated by 80-100 mph of windchill are no walk in the park - but they help contribute to the intrepid astronomer mystique. Also, one further aspect to note is that these remote locations also come with their own particular collection of dangers. For example, down in southern Arizona we I observe a considerable amount, there is a charming array of death masquerading as local fauna - scorpions, bears, rattlesnakes, plague-ridden vermin and poison spiders.

The Equipment
You are at the mercy of the equipment. Equipment tends to malfunction most vigorously when the weather is favorable - I've never had a dewar go soft on me while it is raining out. It will do so swiftly, viciously and without compunction as to how vital your research is to our understanding of the universe - or at least, your projected dissertation completion date. Accepting the foibles of the machinery is more important than ignoring your observing assistant's bad personal hygiene.

Stimulants
Let's face it, going from a 9 to 5 schedule to a 9 to 5 on the other side of the clock (in a day or so) often requires an extra kick in the pants - especially on that second night, about 3 AM. This requirement subsides usually by about night four or five, but in the meantime you need all the help you can get. Two popular choices:
Caffeine - The socially acceptable stimulant of choice. Available in a variety of delivery systems - coffee, tea, hot chocolate, Mountain Dew, or in its most unadulterated form - NoDoz. Of these, coffee is the preferred method.
Nicotine - The socially unacceptable stimulant of choice. Few American astronomers smoke, a large number of European astronomers do.
Aside from these two legally available stimulants, I would guess that there are other not-so-legal methods for staying awake at night, but typically astronomers don't indulge in such things. Part of this comes from the typical academian 'my body is my temple' attitude, but mostly it's due just to astronomers being dirt poor.

Supplies
So you're going to be staying up all night for days on end - is there anything special to bring along? Of course! A few vital supplies not to forget:
Chips Ahoy - Not just any cookies, these particular ones hold up well under the rigorous environment. A quick & effective solution to those late night munchies - pretzels work too, but only the large ones (something to nibble, not gobble).
Music - Whistle while you work - and remember, the more obnoxious the melodies, the greater your chance of staying awake while listening to them. Particularly effective: White Zombie, Offspring, Shotgun Messiah.
Extra Work - On an observing run, you don't stand a snowball's chance of actually doing outside work, but it's a good moral boost - at least when you're packing.
Email Addresses - Social isolation is by no means desirable, and email is a quick & dirty way to stay in contact with the outside world - e.g. "what day is it?" Keep in mind, however, that your correspondees will soon tire of complaints about the weather or the equipment. It also important to be aware that late night email composed before you've successfully kicked your schedule over can be at best incoherent, and at worst incriminating.

Conferences

So you've gotten your data, it's disproved everything you conjectured about in your last paper - it's time to go crawl in a hole and hope nobody notices you were dead wrong, right? Nope - you've gotten a golden justification to write another paper (a good thing- see Publish or Perish above), and even better, you can get government money to go to some strange location to hang out with your colleagues who are doing the exact same work as you (though usually avoiding the incorrect hypothesis part).

Conferences are a matter of networking - to meet people you need to convince your results are true, and to go about convincing those you've already met. Typically this job is easier if your data is good, so this is motivation to do your astronomy right. Essentially, it's fraternity rush all over again - "Hello, damn glad to meet you, come take a look at my poster paper - I think you'll find it the best one on campus." However, since very few conference attendees (they are, after all, astronomers) were in fraternities or even rushed, the analogy is lost on them.

Why are my Web Pages Black?

I've seen it mentioned on the web that "black backgrounds are obnoxious". Well, there's two reasons my pages are black (or at least quite dark, as is the case with this one). The first is that I switched my background to black a few months back in support of the Blue Ribbon Campaign, supporting free speech online - that's also the reason I used to fly the ribbon on my old home page. Typically I object to the whole ribbon idea, whatever the cause - it strikes me like a way that people try to indicate that they're more socially conscious than everybody else, more or less a pissing contest if you ask me. But it is an important cause - astronomy has had its share of censorship already, just ask Galileo - and along the way it helps me spruce up my home page with a pretty graphic.

Secondly, I am an observational astronomer; if you look at my bookmarks, you'll see that there's a lot of links set up for observational work - satellite pictures, the SIMBAD database, etc. These pages see a great deal of use when I'm observing - and since much of my work is carried out under darkroom conditions, it's best to minimize the amount of flux from the various computer screens. Hence the black background.

Prospects for Careers in the Field

In a word, grim. Let's face it, astronomy doesn't directly benefit the general public. Better toaster ovens have not resulted from characterization of the initial mass function. As a result, jobs are in short supply; the end of the Cold War has severely aggravated the already existing job shortage for people who could be building bombs.

I should note that I do believe astronomy to be an absolutely necessary endeavor of any culture worth its weight in salt. Astronomy has consistently produced revolutions - and revelations - in how we view both the universe and ourselves in relation to that universe. It is a hallmark of the curious, exploratory nature of our species. Probably when we came down out of the trees millions of years ago, our ancestors looked back up to whence they came and saw the stars lurking between the branches. Without a doubt, the first grant proposals were written soon thereafter.

Special Aspects of Being an Astronomer

  • You learn to make coffee in complete darkness.
  • Sleeping until two in the afternoon is expected.
  • Being able to do Fourier transforms and other esoteric math in your head is not unusual.
  • You tend to be surrounded by people who are nerdier than you (your colleagues).
  • Enjoy the raw sexual appeal of being in one of the most hazardous professions in the world.
  • Observing runs tend to both keep you busy - 12-16 hours a day - and give you enough time to work on entirely frivolous web pages.


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    This page is current as of 19 December 2011 and managed by Dr. Gerard van Belle, Lowell Observatory (formerly of European Southern Observatory, and prior to that, formerly from Caltech and The Jet Propulsion Laboratory). My guess is that a few people will be amused by my rather random comments, a few will be annoyed by them (for example, economists), and most will just be nonplussed. Any which way, you can vent your spleen by emailing me at gerard@lowell.edu.

    Last modified on 12 October 1996 (we were socked in at the IOTA site). This page was created using Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0 on both Macintosh and PC.