John Mulchaey describes astronomy's shift toward large collaborations and widely accessible digital data. He reflects on how public survey data can let students and other researchers contribute without collecting every observation themselves, and discusses the possibilities of new analysis tools.
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25:41>> So that's what I spend most of my time doing. Most of my time is spent talking to individuals, meeting people, letting them know what we do at a place like Carnegie, letting them know why it's important, letting them know how they can contribute to it. So I think the first thing is you it it turns out a lot of people are very interested in science. This is a good thing. Yeah, this is a very very good thing. And and so for us part of it is connecting to the people who are interested in science, but also the people that have some capacity to really help fund science. So it's convincing people, look, there's a lot of great things you can give your money to, but but you know, we think that there's some things we're doing here at Carnegie that are very special and that we hope people will be interested in. And and
26:21for the most part we've had pretty good luck on that front. But you know, it is it's it's a challenging time because there's a lot of really other good great things people could be funding. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's that's totally fair. And they've got to make choices. >> Yeah, make choices. Yeah. >> Yeah. So you've had a you've had a pretty illustrious career from you know, 30 years of astronomy. A lot has changed in astronomy in those 30 years. What are what are a few things that like really stand out to you about how the landscape of astronomy and astro astronomical research is different today than when you started out as a grad student. >> Yeah. I think it's a really great question. The first one which is I think pretty obvious is that
27:02astronomy has gone from being about in single individuals or sometimes maybe even two individuals to teams. I mean I think this is this is led by things like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey but uh another projects like that that that bring together hundreds of scientists to work on a set of problems as opposed to an individual scientist working on on on their own. You know, so if you go back a hundred years which is a long time, Edwin Hubble he you know all the papers are Edwin Hubble. >> Right. End of sentence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Single author astronomy >> author astronomy papers. When I arrived in the early 90s I mean most of my papers actually are me and one or two other people. So not very different than well. But that change started kind of late 90s early 2000s. We've now moved
27:44into this into this realm where like Mike Glanzin our new director here, right? I mean he led the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 4. I'm on the paper with him. I think that paper I don't know has you know a thousand people or something like that. Because we all contributed together. So I think that's one aspect that has changed is simply it's gone from being kind of a solo person to to this immense thing. The other way it's just similar sort of thing also led by service like Sloan but I think even in some very special ways Hubble legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope is the Hubble Space Telescope is really the first project that released its data up widely to the public. >> Okay. >> So I I had many Hubble programs during my career. I would write a proposal. I
28:26get my data but you know after a year my data would go in the public archive. This meant that other people could then of course work on the data. That's a very non-traditional model. You know, back in Hubble's day he kept the data in his office. We still have his data here stored down in the basement, right? It never was put in any public forum. Now there's this it's a very different world, right? Like the Vera Rubin Telescope, right? All that data is going to be public. And so that has opened up astronomy to everybody, including amateurs. There's a lot of amateurs doing really great things. You can You can go look for exoplanets and and do all sorts of things. And that's I think very different. So astronomy is much more of a kind of a worldwide community than it used to be, um as well. >> Yeah, that's that's a that's a great point. Especially with Vera Rubin now,
29:07they're just they're going to be announcing data almost every day once they get that trigger up. >> That's right. It's going to be huge amounts of data. >> Yeah. >> And so it's going to give people the opportunity. But it really means I mean you could really be an amateur I was an amateur astronomer from a when I was a little kid, that's how I got into astronomy. You know, out with my telescope in the backyard. If If I was a kid now, you could act I could actually be doing a research project as like a teenager quite easily. >> yeah, yeah. Um especially with like AI helping you out with like writing code and things like that. I can't imagine it's it's actually such a green space now. Didn't even >> Well, I I I think and that's the other of course AI is the other component of this, right? Um is how is AI going to interface with the science? And you
29:48know, I uh I barely used Fortran, so I was not I'm not a computer guy in any sense cuz that would just wasn't what happened when I was younger. But AI is going to really revolutionize the field in ways I think we don't fully yet understand. >> Yeah. Um speaking of a computer guy and you you just mentioned Michael Blanton, >> Yeah. >> he is succeeding you as the director of Carnegie Observatories. You were the director for quite a while before him. Um do you have any advice for him?