What professional astronomers do in their job

Hello everybody!
The motivation to start this blog was to write something about what professional astronomers are doing in their job, and to give some insight into their lives. Here is a little story that summarises the most important features of the live of an astronomer.

Imagine you are an astronomer, and you attend a conference on your research subject. The conference takes place in a nice little city with ancient buildings and a rich history, so it is a pleasant place to visit. Sometimes the conferences take place in other continents than your own, so you get to travel a lot. The relaxing atmosphere in the city and at the conference stimulates discussion with your colleagues on scientific topics. You discuss a particular question with your fellows, and suddenly you have a brilliant idea on how to find answers to this questions by observing a number of celestial objects, which are your research subjects. After the conference, where you also gave a talk on previous results of your research and you listened to talks by other researchers, you go home to your institute and write an application to an observatory to get the observations done that should answer your burning question about the Universe. Since the deadline for submission of the observing time proposal is in two weeks, you have to hurry up to write down a precise description of the science case and the observations you want to do. You are not writing the proposal all alone, but rather with three co-investigators, some at institutes in other countries somewhere around the globe, thus it takes some time to discuss the issue and to define the application text. You as principal investigator finally manage to submit your proposal on time.

A committee of the observatory usually composed of other professional astronomers reads your application and those of other astronomers to decide which ideas are the best and should be granted observing time at the highly sophisticated and very expensive instruments of that observatory. You are lucky and the committee decides that your idea is brilliant and deserves the observing time that you asked for. Some of the other proposals are not as brilliant as your and have to be declined, because there is not enough time available to execute them all, while others will be executed as well.

A few months later your objects of interest are finally observable, because at this time of the year they rise high in the night sky above the observatory. You applied for service mode observations, which means that in this case you are not traveling to the observatory yourself to get the observations done, but rather an astronomer employed at the observatory will do the observations for you. (Sometimes astronomers still travel to the observatory to do the observations themselves, which is called "visitor mode", but this is becoming somewhat rarer.) Thus, you send the precise coordinates, exposure times, instrument settings, etc. to that observer, and he executes the observations. When he is done, he sends you the digital data that the instrument (can be a camera, spectrograph, interferometer, etc.) has recorded on a DVD, or you download it from the on-line archive of the observatory.

You receive the data, reduce it, and work on it for months on your computer, do complicated calculations, compare the observed data to model calculations that are provided by some of your co-investigators, and so on. Finally, you find the thing you where looking for in your data (actually, sometimes you don't find it; nature does not always do everything what you expected it to do). Thus, together with your co-investigators and one of your students, who has in the meantime joined the research team, you go and write a scientific article about it for a journal. It takes another three months to write the article (also called a "paper"), nevertheless you finally finish writing and you submit it to a journal that is dedicated to astronomy-related research.

Another professional astronomer (the "referee") gets your article to read and decides whether it is worth publishing, and/or which changes you are asked to to make on the manuscript. You are lucky this time and you get a "nice" referee that asks only a few modifications to your paper before it can be published, which takes you and your student a few weeks to implement (the referee of the most recent paper was really "nasty", the obligations he put on you took you another four months before the paper could be re-submitted!). You make these suggested changes, and your paper finally gets accepted and published in the journal. Now all astronomers in the world can read about the discoveries you have made. Some of them do research in the same field as you, and they cite your paper in their articles because your results are really of significance to them.

You also go to conferences to present your discoveries, and discuss them with your fellow scientists to get feed-back. In a discussion at the conference dinner about another open question in astronomy, one of your colleagues has a brilliant idea of how to solve this question by carrying out some observations. After the conference, she or he starts to write an application for observing time ...

This little story on what astronomers do in their job is of course a bit simplistic. Some astronomers also work on the construction of instruments for telescopes or space observatories, give lectures, calculate theoretical models, do public outreach, etc. Nevertheless, I hope it gives some insight of how astronomical research and the work of a professional astronomers is organised.

Read you soon,
Stefan