Professor Keel Credit: Jeff Hanson
Bill Keel is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama and is also part of the team at Galaxy Zoo. He is the author of The Road to Galaxy Formation and The Sky at Einstein’s Feet ( a book that I thoroughly enjoy 
). Bill kindly let me interview him about what he does as an Astronomer, my questions are in bold.
How did you become an astronomer?
My family thinks it has to do with my grandfather continually pointing out the Moon as we sat on a porch swing. Beyond that, in the 1960s space was big news all the time, and new things were happening constantly. By the time I was about 14, astronomy had seized my brain. I mowed yards for a summer to buy a secondhand 6-inch telescope, whose bright and crisp views were a revelation to me. Then it was off to college and I’ve never looked back on the choice.
What are your areas of research?
Galaxies – anything involving galaxies, it seems I can’t get enough of. Active galactic nuclei, galaxy interactions, galaxy evolution, dust in galaxies, I dabble in the whole range.
How did you get involved with Galaxy Zoo and what do you do there?
I saw a notice (I think it was on the BAUT forum) and found the Zoo forum. Within a few days, I was seeing lots of interesting galaxies that Zooites were posting for discussion and couldn’t help noticing the research uses of some samples of these. So I asked for people to watch for overlapping galaxies and the rest is history. The next year I found myself part of the GZ team. As it’s worked out, I get involved in a lot of science generated by things posted on the Forum, rather than just the initial Zoo goals. This is also a great audience for education and public outreach, so I do posts answering various questions or explaining bits of astronomy. I recently realized that all of my current research grants involve projects spun off from the GZ forum!
What does observing with ground-based and space observatories involve?
Ground-based observing can be a very intense experience, since you may only have a few nights allocated to do a project. During that time, you need to make sure the instrument is performing to specifications, get a check all the necessary calibrations, and make (the mythical) optimum use of the time and conditions. On top of that, and helping make it worthwhile, is that some of us find observing, even with computers intervening in so many ways, to foster a strong sense of connection with the Universe (Sandy Faber also described this, possibly in the oldish “The Astronomers” TV series). These days, the better description of the process would be “taking data, where the goal is to get certain measurements of required quality (and those measurements may be fairly complicated derivatives of your original data). Every night at the telescope (or hour, if you’re a radio observer) may require many times that long in data processing. Scripts can be your friends. Working from the ground, it sometimes helps to take a philosophical view – weather may wipe you out unexpectedly no matter how long you’ve waited for an observing session. (For example, unexpected high winds have brought a stripe of clouds over Kitt Peak, which I’m looking at with disapproval). As my gradate adviser pointed out, it’s easier to be philosophical and wait for another night when you already have a permanent job!
For space facilities, things are of course hands-off. Typically, one proposes a project, which gets reviewed by a committee trying to figure out which 15% of proposals to accept that will actually fit in a given year’s calendar. Then you prepare a detailed description of the observations, and send it in. For all but a few special cases, the next you hear is when the observations are scheduled and your data are being processed to send to you. It’s a different way of working, and to make best use of these facilities you need working knowledge of some facets of orbital dynamics and the space environment (plus a large pile of PDF documents that the agencies think you should be familiar with – my favorite was the 120-page document on changes to Hubble operations with only two gyros that proposers were supposed to have read in its entirety.)
Learn more about Bill Keel at his personal website:http://www.astr.ua.edu/keel/ or follow him on twitter at:@NGC3314
