What DO Astronomers Do?

Astronomy. Astronomers probably do astronomy.

This prompt is a little bit open-ended. What do astronomers do on a day-to-day basis? Well, that depends on the astronomer. A lot of them teach at universities, along with the rest of the physics research community (I say 'rest of' at the risk of lumping astronomy in with physics) as universities are a convenient place to get funding for research. As such, on a day-to-day basis, I imagine they do a great deal of writing on chalkboards, and, depending on the school and the class, grading exams / homework / blogs, lecturing, creating lesson plans, etc. Then there's, of course, the time they need to spend on helping students along (from answering questions on coursework to mentoring to writing letters of recommendation).

On the research side there's likely a great deal of writing proposals (in fact, probably a great deal more than anyone would really like), so that they can have funding and continue doing research. Once funded, they get to (hopefully) collect data. Considering that data needs to come from one of the telescopes either here or in space, any specific data they want to collect requires a request for time at a telescope. As I understand it, the telescopes are generally set up such that any researcher can write a research proposal and ask for use of the telescope. When I say 'use,' I mostly mean that someone (most likely not the researcher him or herself) punches in some numbers, and the telescope moves to take pictures of the area of the sky that said researcher wants to look at.

So, anyway, once they've gotten their data they get to analyze it (again, like the 'rest of' the physics researchers). The analysis depends on the data, but it doubtless includes a lot of computer programming, and sitting and waiting, and possibly a good deal of looking at photographs of stars / galaxies / nebulae... etc.... It really depends on what they have and what they're going to do with it.

Then they get to write another paper. Then they get to submit that for publication, which seems to take months, because it includes peer reviews, and revisions, and more reviews, and possibly all-out rejection and complete re-writes and so on. Then they get published (hopefully), and do it all again! (Or continue working on the same thing...) These steps can, of course, be (and almost always are) taken within a group of astronomers.

So, in conclusion, they do very much the same thing as the rest of the people in the world: they eat, they sleep, they go to work, they come home, they bring work home with them, they work more, and then they drink coffee because they forgot to sleep.

References:
Image by Myle Pinkey