What do Astronomers do?

Many people think that Astronomers spend all their time out at night looking through telescopes, but modern technology has made astronomy a lot more varied and exciting than that!

Telescopes around the World

Modern astronomers use telescopes all over the world, well away from street lights where the skies are dark and the weather is good. Astronomers from Britain regularly fly out to telescopes in places as far away as Hawaii, Australia, Chile and the Canary Islands.

As well as telescopes on the ground, astronomers also use many special satellite telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope and telescopes that look at other kinds of "light" like the X-ray telescope XMM.

All these telescopes are not used to just get nice pictures, but to make measurements.

"... to explore strange new Worlds ..."

We need these measurements if we are going to be able to understand the universe. Remember that Astronomy is a science - the science of the Universe in the same way that Chemistry is the science of chemicals and Biology is the science of living things. Although we have been studying the sky for thousands of years and we now know an awful lot about the way planets, stars and galaxies work, there are still many important things that we do not understand:

• How did the universe form?
• Will it ever "die"? If so, when?
• How many other stars have planets around them?
• Could those planets have life on them?
• Exactly how do stars like the Sun work?

and many more.

It is the astronomers' job to try and find out the answers to some of these important questions.