Source
r/astrophysics•
chain20

Data scientist looking to make some contribution

I have been in the data science/machine learning research industry for almost 10 years now. Astronomy has mostly been a hobby, but I am now looking for ways to apply my skills to the problems in astronomy/astrophysics seriously. I've played with some kaggle astronomy datasets to get my hands dirty and even looked at some papers on astro-ph arxiv. Although my background is lacking, I can definitely follow the 'data modeling' and 'prediction' parts of the papers. Still, I am obviously overwhelmed and lost.

I have started reading to build the theoretical background, but where do I go from here? How can I even begin to make a useful contribution to the field in the long run?

Any pointers or suggestions are appreciated.

PS: Going back to school/academia is not an option for the time being, but I do plan to in the future.

Posted Oct 31, 2020, 4:05 PM UTC

3310
diamondketo•

If you're willing, given your decade of experience, astronomy often look to hire folks for software and data processing work. If you do get in, you may have the opportunity to work with postdocs and professors.

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chain20OP•

How do I find such folks? Does looking at twitter/linkedin work?

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diamondketo•

I recommend checking https://jobregister.aas.org/ at least every 2 weeks. Despite the majority of the listing are for career astronomers, there are frequent postings that do not require a PhD.

PS: I see your comment below saying you're not so confident with knowing what to do if you had astronomy data. u/Andromeda321 recommends this online course https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-driven-astronomy. You're just in time for the first class.

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chain20OP•

Thanks, I'll keep checking the listings.

I felt the course focused more on the 'how to in python' part which I am already familiar with. But maybe I am wrong, I will take another look since you recommend it.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

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Heat-Rises•

Would a Distance Learning approach to getting a degree suit or is that also off the table?

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chain20OP•

I still have my full-time job, so I'm worried I might not be able to commit 100%. So I wanted to start with something more independent.

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astrorocks•

I think you could already do quite a lot of work in digital image analysis and processing. During my BSc, I worked on a computer vision project that used images of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope Legacy Archive (these are all free and you can access them now!) to try to automatically pick out and sort different types of objects in the images. The point was to draw polygons around stellar clusters and associations to get an idea of the different sizes, dispersions, etc and relate that back to the types of galaxies they form in (which can vaguely give you a sense of galaxy age). There are tons of images from the HST so even some ML program that sorts through all those images and classifies them and what types of objects they have might be very, very useful for astronomers. As a bonus, a project like that does not require much astrophysics background in reality. You could probably even do such a project in your downtime to advertise your skill later and get your feet wet, so to speak.

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chain20OP•

Precisely where I feel lost. Even if I get my hands on such datasets, I don't know what to look for because I still don't have a strong background to think of all that could be possible. But, I will still get the image data and start playing.

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astrorocks•

It took me about 2 weeks of reading some papers and looking through pre-analyzed images as a 2nd year BSc student with zero experience in anything more or less to learn how to classify the images ;) Requires no hardcore math or heavy astrophysics theory. You still have to read some papers and learn how to read images and spectra, but I would think that's an easier road to get started on then learning hardcore theory. I just meant more that there might be some places that want to hire data scientists to help with these topics because the classification by a humans is mostly not the difficult part--writing the machine learning algorithms in this case is what's very tough. We published it, but my BSc was a long while ago and the code we came up with was not so great.

Here is a link for a similar academic study. Someone working on such a project would probably welcome a data scientist with lots of machine learning experience, I'd imagine.

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chain20OP•

Makes sense. Thanks.

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