On Astronomy (really. I mean it.)

So I got an email from the Big Enchilada today (aka my thesis advisor).

Here's some back story -- there's a reason I chose to focus my career on education and outreach. If you read about what grad school in astronomy is like (for example at Cat Dynamics), you will find that it is research, research, research. To quote (and I just chose to quote Steinn, but have heard this in many forms from many different people):

"If you are not interested in doing research, you know, exploring the universe, adding new knowledge to mankinds inventory of nature and technology, then you should not be doing a PhD."

I agree wholeheartedly. I think I did a reasonable job actually doing much of what Steinn recommends, but what I realized early on is that although I enjoyed research and was a capable observer, I was not driven to have my own stable of researchers working on the burning questions I deemed most important. I think that my classmates were much more skilled at identifying the interesting questions to pursue. Frankly, I think of all of us, Jamie (who left astronomy immediately after receiving his PhD) was best at identifying a direction for research and did great things in his spare time. He found a tool being used by another group, and applied it in a new and different way, and discovered what we all thought was a new Milky Way satellite when he was a second year grad student. I don't think it panned out, but regardless, it was a pretty interesting result when most of us were worrying about our latest problem set.

At the time, a paper came out that I found pretty fascinating, and wanted to see if the somewhat serendipitous result found by a group of observers could be pursued more systematically and if I could find multiple examples of one particular phenomenon associated with Milky Way-like galaxies. Even in this case, I wasn't very original -- I just realized that the technique Jamie was using could be applied to my prospective targets to choose the ones most likely to be interesting. Jamie and I actually went to Kitt Peak to do the observing, and got the data many years ago now.

I intended to make this a postdoc project, but didn't get a chance to reduce the data during the two years I was a postdoc. Instead, I gave the data to some collaborators, who reduced it and published some conference proceedings. We never got the data published in a refereed journal, but they did find that I was right -- one of the objects I preselected turned out to be something like the 3rd or 4th known example of a pretty rare class of objects. I don't think anyone noticed, though.

So, back to the beginning... I got an email from the Big Enchilada. The collaborators have new, better observations and confirmed this and found that it is even more impressive than we first thought. I think I'll get tacked on to the author list as a token gesture, but it would be nice if I had had the time to actually make this discovery and got this published in 2001.

I have one more good idea that I don't think anyone else has done (it dates back to my Master's thesis, so if you look that paper up in ADS, you can probably figure out what I want to do), and I think it can be done pretty easily with SDSS data. Maybe one of these years I'll make the time to do it.