What Astronomers Do

There is a popular misconception that professional astronomers spend all their time squinting through powerful telescopes in the middle of the night and going ‘Wow’ at frequent intervals as new discoveries are made.

However, that impression is some distance from the truth. For one thing, astronomers have home lives to lead and quite like being awake during the daytime and asleep at night!

For another, optical telescopy is only one aspect of the science of astronomy. Vast amounts of information are gathered by instruments that explore the radio, x-ray and infrared parts of the spectrum, and these look very different from what most people think of when they hear the word ‘telescope’. 

An astronomer is much more likely to study print-outs and computer screens that show them the results of scans that have come from radio dishes or telescope arrays than they are to look through a single optical telescope. They will compare the results obtained from different scans of the same object, each taken from a discrete part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. They will also spend a lot of time programming computers, loading data and interpreting the results.

Professional astronomers are interested in discovering objects that are so far away that they cannot be seen directly. Instead, long-exposure photographs are taken of areas of space in the hope that enough light from a very distant object will accumulate over a period of time for it to register on a photograph.

Another technique is to compare photographs of the same area and see if there have been any changes between the times they were taken. This technique can detect objects that are relatively close to us, including approaching comets and asteroids that might pose a threat to Planet Earth.

Because professional astronomers work in a very different way to amateurs, there is still an important role for amateur astronomers to play. Many discoveries have been made by amateurs in their back gardens that were missed by the professionals, because the latter were busy doing something else at the time.