Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

230 BEAM ME UP
accepted. That, in turn, means that the committee of astronomers
that chooses who gets to use Hubble can be very picky. If your
project can be done from the ground, you get rejected. If your
project takes up too much time with only a marginal return in science
learned, you get rejected. If you ask to do something that’s
already been done, you get rejected. If you ask to do something
someone else is asking to do, and the other proposal is better, you
get rejected.
Get the picture? It also takes days or weeks to prepare a proposal,
time that you could spend working on other projects or trying
to get other grants. You might use up a lot of precious time
preparing your proposal only to have it roundly rejected.
But suppose you are lucky and your idea is accepted. Congratulations!
Now you move to the next step. You have to painstakingly
detail every single thing you want Hubble to do, including the
initial pointing to your target, every exposure, every filter, every little
bump and wiggle needed to get the observations you want. This
detailing may also take several days or weeks, using complicated
software guaranteed to give you a headache.
But finally you finish and submit the final proposal. Congratulations
again!
Now you wait.
It may take up to a year or so to make those observations after
the scheduling goes through. When you do, you are faced with many
gigabytes of data, and you need a lot of software and experience
to analyze them. It may take months or even years to figure everything
out. With luck and perseverance, you may actually get a
paper in the astronomical journals out of all this.
Now, think for a moment about all that work. All that analysis
before and after the observations costs time and money, neither
of which an astronomer has in copious amounts. For someone on
a research grant time is money, and grants are very difficult to
come by. Applying for HST time is a big gamble. You hope to get
accepted, and then you hope the data are good enough to further
your research, so you can get even more grants. I don’t mean to
put so much emphasis on money as a means unto itself, but without
it, it’s pretty hard to do research. In a sense, your future career
as a scientist depends on your ability to get good data; you’re