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The skills of a successful instrumentalist

There is a big overlap between the skills that make a good astronomer and those for success in instrumentation. A good background knowledge of your subject, solid mathematical foundations, and some programming skills will put you in a good position. Depending on the nature of your project, you may have to learn the technical skills required for optical lab work, e.g. handling optical components, working with laser equipment, maintaining or refilling cryostats. Optical setup and alignment work requires patience, a steady hand and attention to detail. Laboratory work can come with safety risks, so you may have to be trained for specific types of activities.

Software work will require more advanced programming and engineering skills, and this is an area of work that is rapidly evolving in our field. Once mostly the work of postdocs alongside their research, software development is gradually becoming a specialty career in astronomy. If you’d like to build a career around software development, professional development practices and fluency with modern tools are becoming increasingly in demand: from coding best practices using Github, unit testing and continuous integration; cloud services such Amazon Web Services; database design and development; and modern management methods such as Agile.

Whereas some astronomy researchers manage to work effectively on their own or with a small number of collaborators all focused on a narrow research topic, teamwork is essential in hardware (and increasingly also software) projects. Being an effective instrumentalist in a large team requires a range of professional skills, such as:

Collaboration can sometimes be challenging as different team members have different incentive structures: astronomers want the best instrument for their science, they want to keep discussing with the community and trading off design options; engineers need firm requirements, clear deliverables and a solid timeline. These can come into conflict, particularly if project management and systems engineering aren’t sufficiently aware of the risk.

To collaborate effectively as an astronomer in such mixed science/engineering teams, gaining experience in engineering can help you bridge this cultural divide and gain an insight into the challenges your co-workers face. If you get the opportunity during your studies to get engineering experience, either informal or through training opportunities, this can be a very valuable addition to your skills set and to your cv. Likewise for software, training in any of the above skills areas would be recommended.

Good places to access formal training in the skills needed for instrumentation work are dedicated summer schools, or professional training courses. The bi-annual SPIE conference on Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation offers good courses. For software, there are online resources to learn new tech skills - some free, some at cost. In recent years a number of conferences are organised that are aimed at up-skilling astronomers in software and coding skills, such as Python in Astronomy, Astro Hack Week, or .Astronomy.