About 15000 working astronomers worldwide in diverse subfields from planetary geology to cosmic ray physics to telescope engineering to computer engineering to cosmology to nuclear physics.
It is rather a club. The minimum entrance requirement is usually a Ph.D.
Funding: about half are university-employed, about half work for the government in some capacity. Specific projects are funded through "grants" from NASA or the NSF (National Science Foundation). "Grant proposals" are written by astronomers or groups of astronomers, submitted (to NASA or NSF), judged by committees, and awarded (or not). Much grant money is used to pay the salaries of astronomers, which is not 100% desirable because grants last only a short time, typically 1-5 years. So a large pool of astronomy jobs are short-term "post-doctoral" appointments. Overall funding for astronomy is fairly healthy, but this situation will not last forever. The graph below shows NASA expenditures steadily dropping as a function of time. NASA funds substantially more astronomy than does the NSF.
Astronomers publish results in technical papers published in one of several professional journals: the "Astrophysical Journal," the "Astronomical Journal," "Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society," "Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific," and "Astronomy and Astrophysics." There are several other, smaller journals ("Memoirs of the Italian Astronomical Society" et cetera.)
"Theoreticians" use mathematical models and computer simulations to try to understand the observations. Like Kepler, or Newton.
"Observers" use telescopes, gather data, interpret data. The distinction between observer and theoretician is blurry.
Conferences are important because (1) astronomers are spread world-wide and it is important to meet face-to-face even in the email age, (2) and most, on a daily basis, are too busy to keep up with developments outside their speciality. Most conferences result in the publication of a book containing the "proceedings" of the conference: articles written by the speakers summarizing what they said at the conference.
Last modified: Mon Oct 18 16:10:03 CDT 1999