Astronomy Buff

What Skills Do You Need to Get a Job in Astronomy?

by Tony on July 7th, 2007

For some reason, my YouTube videos spawn lots of questions on how to get a job astronomy. That’s kind of strange to me since I don’t really talk much about getting a job in them, but nonetheless, my email inbox is littered with different questions on this topic.

So, being a blogger, I’ll use that as a source of inspiration for writing a blog post, this way I get to just refer it to people every time I get the question again.

Because of my background, and the fact that I do not have a PhD, I will narrow my answer to this question to what I call ’support’ jobs. Those are jobs not requiring a PhD and usually involve being a member of a team or project that has programming, data analysis, public relations, instrument design and construction, and data serving needs.

There’s a lot that can be written on how to become an Astronomer-with-a-capital-A, but I’ll save that for future posts and interviews with some of my colleagues.

Let me just bluntly start with a list of skills I think would give you an edge in the astronomy job market:

Image Credit: Sailor Coruscant

Technorati Tags: Astronomy jobs, becoming an astronomer, How to get a job in astronomy, YouTube

• Communicate effectively. If you can effectively present ideas to others, you will get a job. I know this seems like a strange first item on my list, but I’ve come to realize that this ability is crucial. So many people have trouble getting ideas across, it limits how effective they are at their jobs.
• Possess knowledge of astronomical image handling, including acquisition, calibration, archival and retrieval and serving. This includes intimate familiarity with the FITS image file format (it’s not that big of a deal, FITS is easy).
• Familiarity with image data analysis techniques. You need to be able to make subtraction images, ensure that the image pixels are in a scientific unit (like km/sec, etc. This is usually done during image calibration) and know how to measure things from the instruments using software. But most importantly, you need to be able to UNDERSTAND WHAT THE DATA ARE TELLING YOU.
• Expert knowledge of IRAF or IDL. These are software packages that help analyze the data taken. You can easily manipulate images with IRAF and IDL such that you can do the above analysis.
• Understand how scientific detectors (like CCD cameras) work. If you can write control programs for cameras, you are in demand.
• Have good programming skills. I’ve found the language doesn’t usually matter so long as you can quickly adapt to what is being used. I program mostly in LabVIEW, IDL, Perl, C and C++, although I have noticed many people wanting Python skills these days. LabVIEW skills seem to be popular now for controlling ground-based instrumentation.
• Be able to write. I know this is a little redundant since I already mentioned communication skills, but you’ll probably be involved in writing papers, and you’ll advance farther in your job if you do this well.
• Understand adaptive optics. These are being used very effectively on ground-based telescopes.
• Understand image wavelet compression. I believe this will be a big deal as images get larger and larger. JPEG 2000 is also important. Images from instruments are getting more numerous and larger. We gotta be able to serve these effectively.
• Know about virtual observatories. These are collaborations that attempt to serve data from a variety of datasets. They are supposed to allow for easy access to lots of different kind of data from a lot of different instruments, observatories and missions but right now, all they really are is just a broker to show you what’s there, in my opinion, they don’t really help you all that much in getting the data. That will change though as many technical issues are resolved between organizations.
• Be able to combine datasets. Sometimes its very helpful to put together data from different wavelengths, polarization states, scale heights, etc. This requires you to be very familiar with the data that already exist and be able to manipulate it.

That should be enough for now, these are the most important skills I think you should have. I’ll add to it as I think of more or if anyone out there can think of something critical I’ve left out.

These are exciting times to be working in astronomy, we have more eyes on the universe than at any other time in human history. The challenge now is to calibrate, organize, make available and understand what we’re seeing. That means you need to know about images and how to handle them. Any skill you can think of that allows you to do that will help you get that astronomy job.

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