In a word: Moof

Most astronomers have the same basic response when presented with the question of “how did you become an astronomer.” They almost universally answer with some childhood memory of seeing Saturn, Jupiter, or just looking up at the sky. It always as a child, with a telescope, and it’s always heartwarming. And that’s a great thing; astronomy is a very accessible science, in the sense that everyone has some acquaintance with the subject. A clear night is all that’s required. But beyond that it’s very opaque, and oddly enough this is probably what drew me into the field.

I was never really stunned by looking at the sky. It was cool, but I was never struck with the thought “This is what I want to do.” Especially since I had no idea what I meant by “this”. Looking at the sky is fun, but that’s not what astronomers spend their time doing. Astronomers are not professional star-gazers, and I knew that. But I had no idea what they actually did, or what “doing astronomy” actually meant.

So, in my senior year of high school, I spent a month working with a professor at the University of Toledo trying to figure out what astronomers do. At this point I still thought of it just as a hobby, and never seriously considered becoming an astronomer. Even after it was over, I was still set on a computer science degree. But I attended a colloquium there that, though I didn’t know it at the time, would eventually lead me to astronomy more than anything else. It was a talk by one of the scientists from STScI on the Mars Exploration Rovers team, mostly about the Martian atmosphere. I don’t remember what exactly he was talking about, but I do remember a lot of graphs.

But for some reason, these graphs were amazing. They were difficult to read, they had units I’d never heard of (I still can’t remember how wavenumber works), and they had all sorts of intricate meanings. And this was phenomenal! These graphs were where all the information from the mission was combined to make some meaningful result, to show the structure or the composition of the atmosphere, or dust particles, or water droplets. Here was something that could be called “doing astronomy”, the opaque details of the subject and not just the stargazing.

So I guess I’m a bit of an oddity to be so fascinated by something as mundane as graphs. For this I offer no explanation. But they are what drew me into astronomy, with pretty pictures of Saturn and Jupiter playing a more minor role. I’m probably one of the few astronomy students that doesn’t have a big picture of some astronomical body on their wall. Instead I have a graph of the death of stars. It’s a great graph, simultaneously relating Type I and II SNe, black holes, neutron stars, the Chandrasekhar limit, pair production, and many more subjects that I don’t understand. So until someone manages to find a pretty picture that explains all that, I’m sticking with the graph.

—cts