• Question: does traviling round the world help/affect your own personal work

    Asked by lucy to Heather, Helen, Hugh, Jane, Julian on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Helen Johnson

      Helen Johnson answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Travelling around the world as an astronomer is brilliant, I’ve been to Chile twice already and will get to go back again in January! While I was out there I used huge telescopes in the desert to collect data for my PhD work. My office mates have been to Hawaii, and often we get to travel to present our work at conferences too.
      The main reason we do all this travelling is because we can get much more detailed / higher quality observations from these remote telescopes. If you’re up a mountain there’s a) fewer clouds! b) fewer bright lights from nearby cities and c) the air is much drier (very important for certain observing wavelengths), and more stable. Doing an astronomy PhD definitely has perks!

    • Photo: Julian Onions

      Julian Onions answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      I haven’t done too much travelling. Computers are much the same anywhere. I’ve been to meetings in Madrid and Trieste, and they are always fun to meat up with other like minded people.
      Eating ice cream at midnight in a t-shirt in Trieste while talking astronomy was fun!

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