Astronomy Career Prospects

Further Reading: Astronomy

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Vision For Space Exploration ... In pursuit of these goals, the Vision called for the space program to complete the International Space Station by 2010; retire the Space Shuttle by 2010; develop a new Crew Exploration Vehicle (later renamed Orion) by 2008, and conduct its first human spaceflight mission by 2014; explore the Moon with robotic spacecraft missions by 2008 and crewed missions by 2020, and use lunar exploration to develop and test new approaches and technologies useful for supporting sustained exploration of Mars and beyond; explore Mars and other destinations with robotic and crewed missions; pursue commercial transportation to support the International Space Station and missions beyond low Earth orbit. Outlining some of the advantages, U. S...

Ultraviolet Astronomy ... Ultraviolet line spectrum measurements are used to discern the chemical composition, densities, and temperatures of the interstellar medium, and the temperature and composition of hot young stars. UV observations can also provide essential information about the evolution of galaxies...

Radio Astronomy ... Radio astronomy is conducted using large radio antennas referred to as radio telescopes, that are either used singularly, or with multiple linked telescopes utilizing the techniques of radio interferometry and aperture synthesis... The use of interferometry allows radio astronomy to achieve high angular resolution, as the resolving power of an interferometer is set by the distance between its components, rather than the size of its components... Jansky wanted to investigate the radio waves from the Milky Way in further detail, but Bell Labs re-assigned him to another project, so he did no further work in the field of astronomy...

Observational Astronomy ... As a science, astronomy is somewhat hindered in that direct experiments with the properties of the distant universe are not possible... Since that time, observational astronomy has made steady advances with each improvement in telescope technology... A traditional division of observational astronomy is given by the region of the electromagnetic spectrum observed: Optical astronomy is the part of astronomy that uses optical components (mirrors, lenses and solid-state detectors) to observe light from near infrared to near ultraviolet wavelengths...

Theory Of Relativity ... Scope The theory of relativity transformed theoretical physics and astronomy during the 20th century...

Digital Photography ... Until the advent of such technology, photographs were made by exposing light sensitive photographic film, and used chemical photographic processing to develop and stabilize the image. By contrast, digital photographs can be displayed, printed, stored, manipulated, transmitted, and archived using digital and computer techniques, without chemical processing...

Astronomical Symbols ... While they are still commonly used in almanacs and astrological publications, their occurrence in published research and texts on astronomy is relatively infrequent, with some exceptions such as the Sun and Earth symbols appearing in astronomical constants, and certain zodiacal signs used to represent the solstices and equinoxes...

ESRO ... The ESRO convention, the organisations founding document outlines it as an entity exclusively devoted to scientific pursuits. This was the case for most of its lifetime but in the final years before the formation of the European Space Agency (ESA), ESRO began a programme in the field of telecommunications...

Gamma-ray Astronomy ... Most astronomical gamma-rays are thought to be produced not from radioactive decay, however, but from the same type of accelerations of electrons, and electron-photon interactions, that produce X-rays in astronomy (but occurring at a higher energy in the production of gamma-rays)...

Celestial Mechanics ... This device mechanically computes the positions of celestial bodies "with reference to the observer's position on the surface of the earth." Claudius Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (c.120 CE) was an ancient astronomer and astrologer in early Imperial Roman times who wrote several books on astronomy... The most significant of these was the Almagest, which remained the most important book on predictive geometrical astronomy for some 1400 years...

Galileo Galilei ... His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honour), and the observation and analysis of sunspots...

Cybernetics ... Chemistry Acid-base reaction theories · Alchemy Analytical chemistry · Astrochemistry Biochemistry · Crystallography Environmental chemistry · Food science Geochemistry · Green chemistry Inorganic chemistry · Materials science Molecular physics · Nuclear chemistry Organic chemistry · Photochemistry Physical chemistry · Radiochemistry Solid-state chemistry · Stereochemistry Supramolecular chemistry Surface science · Theoretical chemistry Astronomy Astrophysics · Cosmology Galactic astronomy · Planetary geology Planetary science · Stellar astronomy...

X-ray Astronomy ... X-ray emission is expected from astronomical objects that contain an extremely hot gas at temperatures from about a million kelvin (K) to hundreds of millions of kelvin (MK). Although X-rays have been observed emanating from the Sun since the 1940s, the discovery in 1962 of the first cosmic X-ray source was a surprise...

History Of Science And Technology ... In Ptolemaic Egypt, the Egyptian tradition merged with Greek astronomy and Babylonian astronomy, with the city of Alexandria in Lower Egypt becoming the centre of scientific activity across the Hellenistic world... His works on astronomy, including the Almagest, became the most influential books in the history of Western astronomy... Following the Muslim conquest of Egypt, the region came to be dominated by Arabic culture and Islamic astronomy...

Theoretical Astronomy ... Astronomy is a branch of science, but unlike other sciences, which have Earth-based laboratories in which controlled experiments are performed, astronomy has its labs located in the heavens far beyond the reach, let alone control, of the terrestrial observer... Ptolemy's Almagest, although a brilliant treatise on theoretical astronomy combined with a practical handbook for computation, nevertheless includes many compromises to reconcile discordant observations... Theoretical astronomy is usually assumed to have begun with Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), and Kepler's laws...

History Of Astronomy ... Mesopotamia The origins of Western astronomy can be found in Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" Tigris and Euphrates, where the ancient kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia were located... Our knowledge of Sumerian astronomy is indirect, via the earliest Babylonian star catalogues dating from about 1200 BC...

Forensic Science ... In modern use, the term "forensics" in the place of "forensic science" can be considered correct as the term "forensic" is effectively a synonym for "legal" or "related to courts". However the term is now so closely associated with the scientific field that many dictionaries include the meaning that equates the word "forensics" with "forensic science"...

Science ... In modern use, "science" more often refers to a way of pursuing knowledge, not only the knowledge itself. It is "often treated as synonymous with ‘natural and physical science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics...

Astronomy ... However, the invention of the telescope was required before astronomy was able to develop into a modern science... Historically, astronomy has included disciplines as diverse as astrometry, celestial navigation, observational astronomy, the making of calendars, and astrology, but professional astronomy is nowadays often considered to be synonymous with astrophysics... During the 20th century, the field of professional astronomy split into observational and theoretical branches...

Planetary Science ... Planetary scientists are generally located in the astronomy and physics or earth sciences departments of universities or research centres, though there are several purely planetary science institutes worldwide...

Astrophysics ... Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–250 BC) first put forward the notion that the motions of the celestial bodies could be explained by assuming that the Earth and all the other planets in the Solar System orbited the Sun...

Visible-light Astronomy ... It includes imaging, where a picture of some sort is made of the object; photometry, where the amount of light coming from an object is measured, spectroscopy, where the distribution of that light with respect to its wavelength is measured, and polarimetry where the polarisation state of that light is measured. An example of spectroscopy is the study of spectral lines to understand of what kind of matter light is going through...

Astrometry ... In the 10th century, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi carried out observations on the stars and described their positions, magnitudes and star color, and gave drawings for each constellation, in his Book of Fixed Stars. Ibn Yunus observed more than 10,000 entries for the sun's position for many years using a large astrolabe with a diameter of nearly 1.4 metres...

List Of Astronomers ... They may have won major prizes or awards, developed or invented widely used techniques or technologies within astronomy, or are directors of major observatories or heads of space-based telescope projects. List of astronomers The following is a list of notable astronomers...

Infrared Astronomy ... Infrared astronomy began in the 1830s, a few decades after the discovery of infrared light by William Herschel in 1800... After a number of discoveries were made in the 1950s and 1960s in radio astronomy, astronomers realized the information available outside of the visible wavelength range, and modern infrared astronomy was established... Infrared and optical astronomy are often practiced using the same telescopes, as the same mirrors or lenses are usually effective over a wavelength range that includes both visible and infrared light...