The world of astronomy research may seem intimidating at first glance, but if you’re reading this, that means you’ve already taken a huge step towards pursuing research as an astronomer! This page is for those of you who are curious about research, but may not know where to start.

How do I learn about astronomy research?

Astrobites

This is a great place to start if you’ve never looked at a paper before. They have grad students distill new and exciting research down to an article that contains the key points. They also have a helpful guide (https://astrobites.org/2013/02/21/getting-started-in-undergraduate-research/) about how to get involved in research as an undergrad, as well as guides for other career options or grad school applications.

ArXiv

Find some of the most recent manuscripts in the field here.

SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Search for specific research articles here.

What skills are useful to getting started in astronomy research?

Programming

Most astronomers use programming to analyze data. The language used by most (but not all) astronomers is Python. Thankfully, there are plenty of useful free resources out there to help you learn python! Another upside to learning python is that it’s a very marketable skill outside of astronomy as well!

Python for Astronomers Astronomer Imad Pasha wrote this incredibly helpful FREE online textbook on how to get started with programming. This is a great step one for people who have never seen a command line before, and it is only ~60 pages long. Working through this and being familiar with Python’s capabilities will give you many of the tools you need to get started on your own project.

Codecademy This interactive codecademy course is completely free and a great way to learn the basic language associated with programming, as well as coding in Python.

Learn astropy Astropy is a python module that contains a ton of useful functions that astronomers can use to analyze data. The linked website has many different tutorials to help you use astropy to analyze different kinds of astronomical data.

GradMap Python Tutorials GradMap is a group of astronomers and physicists at the University of Maryland that work towards and provide resources for promoting diversity in physics and astronomy. They also have incredibly helpful coding workshops for complete beginners, and all of their material is online! At the link, you’ll find their github page – you can download this repository and look through the notebooks for an introduction to data analysis in Python.