Astronomy ABCs: A is for Astronomy
I used to write the way I breathe. It was effortless. I would have a thought and I would write it down, which changed very little in the distance between my head and my fingers. I haven’t written much in a while, though I’ve tried to create systems that encourage it. I really did want to learn and write a bunch about Venus, but…well. You can see how that turned out.
Part of my job is writing a monthly public science talk. Every month I choose a topic and write a roughly hour-long presentation on it. I script out every talk. I know that this isn’t necessarily “good” practice among scientists, but I do it for a couple of reasons:
I get really nervous when I’m speaking. A script is like a security blanket. If/when I get so nervous that I forget the point of the slide, I have something to fall back on.
The script is a little gift to future me. Once a talk is written, I’ll give it whenever. It’s on the schedule for a certain month but if a group wants to hear it 4 months later, who am I to say no? I write a script because I know I am forgetful. A script allows me to pick up the talk months later and know exactly what I meant to say.
It just helps me weave a story. The flow from slide to slide is better.
I’ve been in this position for a little over 2.5 years and I’ve written 36 individual talks, most of them hour-long public lectures. I was curious to see how much writing a year of public lectures was, so I counted up every word of each of the 12 scripts I wrote in 2024. The result: 65,491 words. A 200 page book - depending on page size and formatting - is 50,000 to 60,000 words.
Ah! No wonder I haven’t been writing more on my own! I wrote a book last year. And, since my 2025 lectures are roughly the same length as my 2024 lectures, I’m sure I’m well on my way to writing a book this year, too.
I really thought I had lost any skill I had as a writer because I couldn’t turn it on at a moment’s notice. But seeing the amount I wrote last year compiled in one place made me think that maybe I’m just trying to force myself to write about things that don’t fit into my life right now. If I may say so, the lectures I wrote are good. I think I explain complex things pretty well to a lay audience.
All of this was a long preamble before introducing a new series: Astronomy ABCs. Every month gets a letter and I will write at least one piece on an astronomical concept that begins with that letter. Why should you trust me when I have failed so many times before? I don’t know, maybe you shouldn’t. But I did spend an hour yesterday making a list of topics organized alphabetically. Do with that what you will.
The best place to start in the alphabet is the beginning, and for English that letter is A. A is for Astronomy.
And listen, I thought about this. A could have been for Accretion Disks. Or AGN. Or Asteroid. Or Airy Disk. But if I’m going to start a series of astronomy-themed posts, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about what astronomy is.
Astronomy (or astrophysics, if you prefer) is the scientific study of space and the objects and phenomena we see there. It brings together physics, math, chemistry, geology, and computer science to figure out how galaxies, planets, and the Universe itself works. There are many subfields in astronomy - cosmology, extragalactic astronomy, planetary science, exoplanet astronomy, stellar astronomy, the list goes on - but if it studies something in space, I consider it under the umbrella of astronomy.
Astronomy is also incredibly old. Early civilizations used observations of the sky to keep track of days, months, and seasons, many developing a complex mythology that encodes generational astronomical knowledge.
With a few exceptions, astronomy is an observational science. At least right now, we can’t travel to a nebula and gather a sample of cosmic dust and gas to study. We need to view our subjects from afar using telescopes that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light. The closest we can get to bringing a bucket of star back to Earth is using telescopes to gather light from far off objects as it travels in our direction.
Over the next several months I plan to write explainers on astronomical topics ranging from the small to the very, very large, from close by to very far away, from massless to massive. Some topics I’ve identified are topics I know well. Others…less so. If I do this right then we all learn something.
Next month is the letter B. What will I write about? Black holes? Blue stragglers? The Big Bang? Something else? Check back to see!
