Target-Centric Astronomy | astrobites

It’s a familiar experience: sitting down to your desk with a big pile of data in front of you.  You’re looking at the results of a difficult and expensive observing run, one that required months of preparation to pull off.  Before you went, you spent days thinking about what data you needed and how best to get it, not to mention weeks petitioning your superiors for access to costly equipment and facilities.  And even once you started gathering information, it was still a matter of luck as to how much you’d get and of what quality it would be.  Now that it’s all here, you have to sit down for the next step: analyzing and processing it, teasing out high-level conclusions from the raw data while accounting for all possible errors and referring back to your peers’ work on the subject.  When you’ve finally managed that, you’ll write it all down and send it off for review, and with any luck you’ll have shed some light on the current state of nuclear weapons programs in Iran. Wait, what? Astr

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• Henry Zimmerman