Re: What is a typical day in a life of an astronomer like?

A Day in the Life of an Astronomer

Dear Evlyn,

One thing that may surprise you is that I don't use a telescope every night (or even most nights!). Most days go something like this:

I wake up in the morning, have breakfast with my husband and take the bus to my office between 8 and 9 am, sipping at the coffee in my travel mug.

I log onto the networked computer workstation on my desk, and check e-mail for notices of interesting scientific talks, messages from my advisors, or a Mad Scientist Network Question.:) Then I answer any of the above if they're there. If it's a difficult Mad Sci Net question, I might put off starting to answer it until the evening, when my mind isn't very efficient for work purposes anyway.

Once or twice a week I have a meeting with my advisor from about 10:30 to 11 am, where we talk about how to get my thesis research off the ground and the paper we're going to submit for publication.

Otherwise, I spend the morning trying to organize and develop my thoughts about how to study the star-formation history of M33 (2nd closest galaxy to the ours). Or, I develop a couple of paragraphs and touch up the tables and plots for the paper we want to submit soon.

After lunch from about 1 to 1:30 pm, I'll probably spend the afternoon doing the same sorts of things, or doing things that those projects lead to. This may involve any combination of the following: Searching the databases of published work for relevant results, downloading and reading papers, calculating quantities to put in the paper to support some point that we make. All of these things rely heavily on the use of computers--whether for text editing, making calculations, or searching the literature and public data.

Then, between 6 and 7 pm, I go home, make dinner and clean up with my husband, try to get some exercise, maybe call Mom, and go to sleep between 9 and 10 pm or so.

This is my daily life, right now. But I'm a graduate student, so if a professor or senior scientist had gotten this question to answer, it would probably have been different. I would think you'd have heard more about meetings and big tele-conferences about the progress of some huge space mission, planning lectures and curricula, writing homeworks and tests, etc.

Typically, people in my particular specialization (infrared astronomy) go observing once or a few times a year for a few nights to a week or so each time. This involves having written a successful proposal to use telescope time for an experiment several months in advance. Then when the time comes, we fly to the closest city to the observatory, drive up the mountain, and reverse our sleep schedules. While on the mountain, we wake up at about 2pm, prepare a nice big meal to get us going an hour or so before sunset, prepare for the night's observations, and set up the camera and computers. Open the dome after sunset, and begin the observations. Hopefully, nothing breaks during the night, and no clouds come through. As the sky starts to lighten up, we shut everything down, archive the night's data to take with us (on a high-density tape or CD), and go to bed (about 7 am).

When the run is over, we fly home with our data and spend lots of time on our computers calibrating and analyzing that data with powerful software packages, hopefully to write up and publish as soon as possible in a professional journal article. Occasionally, we travel to conferences to see what others are doing, network, and present our results in a talk or poster.

So, that's my personal experience of being an astronomer so far. Hope this helps! :)

-Kristin

[My day as a research astronomer in a Government laboratory is remarkably similar. The details differ, of course, because I work as a radio astronomer rather than an infrared astronomer. Nonetheless, the basic idea of spending lots of time at a computer working with data is a good summation. Moderator]