Astronomers

>>8712319
I think it depends on what you're working on and where.

>>8712319
damn, it was my childhood dream, too bad i live in a shit tier 3rd world european country so to actually be in top tier observatory and see planets with my own eyes is kind a unlikely and it kills me

how many people are there in the world that get to work at these top tier places? 100?

I'm only a PhD student but I'm looking for a postdoc at the moment.

If you love the work it's pretty good. It is stressful, and hugely competitive. Most of my time is spent coding or writing, I'm an observer so I spend my time reducing data. It can be tedious at times if you get bogged down in a project you lose interest in. The good points are that the work can be rewarding, the bad point is the lack of job security. I'm in the market for a postdoc now but I will have to re-apply in a year or two. You do get to travel a bit, I've observed at a couple big telescopes including the AAT and the VLT. I also got to use the Hubble Space Telescope for 14 orbits last cycle.

>>8713889
I envy you

>>8713852
Top research telescopes don't have eyepieces unfortunately. You see detail on the planets with a pretty small amateur telescope.

>>8713900
I get it , because they are needed to analyse the light and stuff, but there has to be some big ones that let you see a planet like an amateur one let you see the moon

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>>8713908
Not that I'm aware of at least. It does get better with big telescopes because you average over more of the atmosphere but not much. This is an image of Saturn taken though a 4 meter telescope which is sometimes use with an eyepiece It's pretty unique for a telescope of that size, it's really only done because that telescope has crap instruments. As you can see it's not bad but you could do as well with a small telescope, a webcam and some processing. Seeing it in the flesh is always better and I've never seen it that clearly but it's still not the Moon.

The limiting factor here is the turbulence in the atmosphere atmosphere which blurs the images, it sets a scale length and telescopes with bigger diameters don't really improve in angular resolution. This is typically 30-10 cm depending on the site and conditions. The images do get more stable but to do much better you need adaptive optics which can correct for this seeing but it's hard, doesn't work well in the visible and has small fields of view.

>>8713954
Just by thinking to see this live with my own eyes sends shivers down my spine.

So the "big" detailed images of planets we have are made using image editors like photoshop? We actually dont possess any HD real footage?

I work at an observatory as an engineer.

Oddly enough I don't care for star-gazing much though.

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>>8713967
You can see something not a million miles away from that though a small telescope. I have. You should visit your local astronomy club, they're everywhere.

High res images of the planets can come from a few sources. Firstly that image I posted is a single image, you can do much better by taking video and the stacking the good frames where the atmosphere was stable for a moment. Professional astronomers call it lucky imaging. Some amateur astronomers do very well with that. This is an image from one such guy, Damian Peach who is probably the best in the world at this. This is using a 35 cm telescope, much smaller than the 4 meter. Secondly they can be from the Hubble Space Telescope which doesn't suffer from this limitation in resolution. There are a few images using adaptive optics similarly. Lastly the best images are from spacecraft which visited these planets, they can take truly high resolution images because they very close.

>>8714025
Which observatory?

>>8714028
Thank you so much for taking time to explain.

Amazing field of work. Truly.

>>8714025
I'd rather not say because the staff force is so small.

I work in adaptive optics.

>>8714190
>>8714044

>>8714190
Fair enough. I know quite a few people who work on AO, particularly on CANARY a demonstrator for the E-ELT and some people who work on GALACSI from MUSE on the VLT. I also know a PhD student who in his first 3 months put his finger though a 100 k deformable mirror.

>>8713889
How complicated is the coding?
I'm currently stuck in a job but going back to school to become one in a year or so.
But this is my passion, ive dreame of it scince i was like 5 years old

>>8712319
you'll be into aliens in no time anon, just wait, next thing you know you'll be fucking reticulans on the sofa, only to have your memory wiped before dawn