The German astronomy job market
There is a lot of discussion about the dismal prospects for an academic career, especially in the German astronomy community, but there are hardly any numbers. Here I would like to provide some.
Since several years, the German Astronomical Society (Astronomische Gesellschaft) collects job offers for German (and some international) openings on their job register. While this is certainly not complete, it is pretty extensive and my impression is that most major jobs that are publicly advertised can also be found there. So I went through the list of about 300 offerings from 2011 to date and categorized all jobs into three categories “PhD position”, “Postdoc position” (i.e. academic non-tenured position) and “tenured or tenure-track position” (i.e. professorships, research assistants, but also PR jobs with close academic relations). I selected only jobs in Germany which shrinks the list to 248 positions (note that some offerings were for multiple positions). Without further ado, here’s the result:
A couple of notes:
- Assuming that most Ph.D. offerings lead to the production of 1 astronomer, the “production rate” of astronomers in Germany is about 30/year. (Note added 21 Oct 2015: Actually, the number is even higher since only a fraction of Ph.D. positions are advertised via this jobregister. In Heidelberg and Munich alone, two big astro places in Germany, there are probably about 30 Ph.D. offerings per year)
- The number of postdoc offerings is similar to the number of Ph.D. offerings suggesting that either almost all Ph.D.s stay in academia or that those who stay remain in the postdoc phase for a long time.
- The ratio of production rate (30/yr) to the “sink rate” (tenured or tenure-track position, 1.6/yr), let’s call this the oversubscription factor, is about 20.
- About half of the tenured positions are PR positions such as planetarium jobs or editors for astronomical magazines; the W1 junior professorship that were offered were not tenured or tenure-track. They are essentially junior groupleader positions with additional teaching.
A couple of thoughts:
- An oversubscription of about 10 (roughly the case for proposals to ALMA from Europe or the U.S.) is considered unproductive by many senior astronomers.
- It seems hard to avoid the conclusion that either the job register or the job market is flawed.
Querying the ESO archive
As the big observatories of the world observe ever more astronomical objects, their archives become powerful research tools. Finding out whether an object has been observed with a certain instrument is just a few mouse clicks away, if the observatory has a public archive like ESO provides for all VLT instruments.
However, if you would like to perform more complex searches, the web interface may not be enough, although it has become very comfortable to use, especially with Astropython’s astroquery package.
For a research project, I recently needed to find all local AGNs ever observed with a certain instrument (SINFONI at the VLT). Since I didn’t know the target names or programmes, I got all unique observed coordinates, resolved them via Simbad (which also gives the class of an object) and then selected the AGNs among all the targets.
Since ESO unfortunately does not provide direct access to the archive database, a query like “give me all unique observed coordinates” is not possible per se. So I had to download all headers, parse the relevant information and build my own database (SQLite for the moment).
I have a script to collect the metadata, which does this:
- query the ESO archive for all observations of a day
- then parse the resulting html file for the unique identifiers of each dataset (“data product ID” or DPID, e.g. XSHOO.2015-04-13T04:46:11.730)
- download the header for the given DPID
- parse the header for relevant information and construct an SQL insert statement
- insert all into a database
There are also scripts that
- query the database for all programmes and search metadata (PI/CoI names, titles) for them
- get atmospheric data for all observations (querying the ambient conditions server)
- And there is a top-level script that calls all of these scripts in a meaningful way and that I call about once a month or when needed to update the database.
My database consists of one table for each ESO instrument that I am interested in (currently MIDI, SINFONI and X-SHOOTER), a table with programme meta data (PI/CoI names and titles), a table with atmospheric data as well as tables with basic information about calibrators and science objects that I use for matching up observations and building LaTeX tables in a scripted way. This has become quite handy over the recent years and has helped me in building the largest sample of interferometrically observed AGNs with MIDI (Burtscher et al. 2013) as well as the largest sample of local AGNs observed with SINFONI (Burtscher et al. 2015) and a follow-up paper (submitted).
In case you are interested in tables that I have already compiled and am maintaining, please contact me and I will be happy to share the database with you. It is currently about 700 MiB and I update it every month.
Apart from nice science, one can also use this database to create other plots of interest, like a map of the exposure depth of SINFONI for example:
Interestingly, the Galactic Center (at 17:45h, -29 deg) is not the field with the deepest SINFONI integration time (“just” about 400 hours). Instead the Extended Chandra Deep Field South is the deepest SINFONI field with about 600 hours of integration time. Another field with deep coverage is the COSMOS south field (10:00h, +02 deg). About 300 hours of total integration time have been spent on this field.
Update 12 Jan 2016: I have now put my codes and the database online. Please see the github project page for further details on how to use these.
Locale and awk
awk behaves differently on different computers depending on the language and other local settings, the so called “locale“. This is especially annoying when working with floating point numbers (e.g. using awk as a calculator since bash can only deal with integers…). With my German locale, it then uses the comma instead of the point as the decimal point character. (The Wikipedia article on the decimal mark shows the world divided into “comma” and “point” countries…)
The way around this is, of course, to change the locale, e.g. like this:
export LC_NUMERIC="C"
Useful tool: ADS to BibDesk
In order to keep an overview of my references and also to quickly add them to publications, I add references that I find useful to the bibliography manager BibDesk. To add a paper, I would copy the BibTeX code on ADS into BibDesk and then link the PDF so that it can be easily retrieved later. I have set up BibDesk such that it uses simple cite codes (such as burtscher2015) and uses these codes also as the file name of the PDF. This way I can easily open the PDF from any application by activating Spotlight and typing in the cite code.
This “workflow” has served me well so far, but now I found a tool that makes this even more streamlined. The “Service” (i.e. a context-menu extension for Mac OS X) ADS to BibDesk allows to add a paper to BibDesk by simply right clicking on the bib code (among many other ways of ingesting references). It is essentially a Python script with a Workflow wrapper and works fine on my Mac with OS X 10.10.3. Thanks to Jonathan Sick and contributors for providing and maintaining such a useful tool!
Kundenvermeidungsstrategien
(This is a German post about customer service by companies)
Kunden sind lästig und mit ihnen auch noch kommunizieren zu müssen kostet Geld und Nerven. Logisch, dass Firmen mit allerlei Tricks versuchen, Kontaktformulare gut zu verstecken und möglichst keine E-Mail-Adressen rausrücken. Wenn sich in dieser Kundenvermeidungsstrategie aber Risse auftun, ist es manchmal amüsant zu lesen, wie um den heißen Brei herum laviert wird. Hier z.B. eine E-Mail von DHL (Absender und Reply-To: noreplyKSDHLPaket@dhl.com) auf eine Anfrage zur Sendungsverfolgung (ein Paket war verloren gegangen):
Bei Fragen können Sie uns gerne jederzeit telefonisch oder per eMail kontaktieren.
Bitte antworten Sie nicht auf die eMail-Adresse “noreplyKSDHLPaket@dhl.com“, dieses Postfach wird nicht gelesen. Bitte benutzen Sie für die Kommunikation per eMail ausschließlich die “Antwort” Funktion Ihres eMail-Programmes.
Bei Fragen stehen wir Ihnen gern zur Verfügung.
Da weiß der Kunde dann wirklich nicht mehr, wo er dran ist und schreibt einfach einen Brief — aber vielleicht war das ja auch gewollt, denn DHL gehört schließlich der Deutschen Post…?
Automatically detect network and adapt /etc/hosts
Here is a little bash script that allows you to detect a change in the wireless network connection of a Mac (using OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks). You may run it in the background or regularly using cron (then remove the while true loop).
#!/bin/bash
hosts_culan="/etc/hosts_CuLAN"
hosts_else="/etc/hosts_else"
while true; do
ssid=`/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport -I | grep " SSID" | awk '{print $2}'`
if [[ -z "$ssid" ]]; then ssid="none"; fi
echo "current WLAN ssid is $ssid"
if [[ $ssid == "CuLAN" ]]; then
echo "ssid is CuLAN"
# check
if [[ -f $hosts_culan ]]; then
mv /etc/hosts $hosts_else
mv $hosts_culan /etc/hosts
echo "changed /etc/hosts to CuLAN"
fi
else
echo "ssid is not CuLAN"
if [[ -f $hosts_else ]]; then
mv /etc/hosts $hosts_culan
mv $hosts_else /etc/hosts
echo "changed /etc/hosts to non-CuLAN network"
fi
fi
echo "script done"
sleep 10
done
ownCloud on a Raspberry Pi
For those of us who do not like to share they private files with companies (or even secret services…) with dubious privacy rules, there is an alternative called ownCloud, since a few days now in version 6.0. It allows you to host many of these convenient “cloud” features on a server of your liking. The optimum control over your data is reached when running it on a “server” in your own home. For this, a Raspberry Pi (“Raspy”) seems the perfect hardware to start. It is a very compact, cheap and power-efficient computer that works well for not too busy server purposes. In my case, I wanted to start simple with just a Dropbox replacement. Here I describe briefly what I did to configure a self-hosted Raspy behind a NAT router using dynamical DNS and of course SSL encrypted connections with an emphasis on the parts that weren’t trivial…
- Installing and configuring the Raspy including ownCloud was no problem at all. There are plenty of good descriptions on the web.
- The first tricky part was the network configuration. I registered ileo.no-ip.biz with no-ip.biz, a dynamical DNS provider and configured my DSL modem / router to forward port 8443 to 443 of the Raspy’s local IP address, i.e. ileo.no-ip.biz:8443 is forwarded to 192.168.1.10:443. This was all fine, except that I couldn’t reach my Raspy my new domain from inside my LAN. It turned out the reason was that the router needed to support what is referred to as either “reverse NAT” or “NAT loopback”. This is needed so that the router does the port forwarding not just for requests from the internet to the LAN but also vice versa. After googling for a while I didn’t seem to find a way to tell my router (a “Alice IAD WLAN 3231”) to activate NAT loopback.
But after a few days, without having changed anything on the router, it suddenly worked…Unfortunately no miracle had happened, I had simply forgotten that I had edited /etc/hosts on my Mac. A first simple workaround was then to have a script run by cron every minute that checks the network name and adapts the /etc/hosts to my environment. However, this of course doesn’t work for any of my iDevices and it is not a very elegant solution anyway. My second attempt was therefore to install a light-weight DNS server on my Raspy (I am using dnsmasq) which works fine. I found these pages useful for configuring dnsmasq. - The second problem was the configuration of the SSL connection. Of course you want your webserver to serve its content encrypted (otherwise you might as well stick with Dropbox…). There are good instructions on the web how one enables SSL for Apache using self-signed certificates (i.e. avoiding to pay 50-100 USD/EUR per year for a commercial certificate). Following these instructions, I could connect to my Raspy using HTTPS. Of course a warning came, that the certificate was not trusted. Here the crucial thing is to not just click “Continue”, but check the box at “Always accept …” and confirm with your Mac’s admin account (after verifying that the certificate is yours, of course…). Only then would the Mac ownCloud desktop sync client start to establish a connection to the Raspy.
Updated on 2014-01-03
Öffentlicher Vortrag am Gymnasium Penzberg, Samstag, 16. März
Vortragsankündigung: Das Schwarze Loch im Zentrum unserer Milchstraße
Samstag, 16. März 2013, 10:00 Uhr im Atrium des Gymnasiums Penzberg (Eintritt kostenfrei)
Es gibt eigentlich kaum mehr Zweifel, dass schwarze Löcher tatsächlich im Weltraum existieren. Und doch fehlt bislang der unumstößliche Beweis, dass es sie gibt. Genau hier setzt das neuartige Instrument “GRAVITY” an, das derzeit unter der Leitung des Garchinger Max-Planck-Instituts für extraterrestrische Physik entwickelt wird. Das primäre Ziel dieses Instruments wird das Zentrum unserer Milchstraße sein, das so genannte Galaktische Zentrum, wo sich das wohl am besten untersuchte supermassereiche Schwarze Loch befindet. Durch jahrelange Detailarbeit wurden viele Sternorbits im Galaktischen Zentrum genau vermessen und damit die Masse des zentralen Objekts auf 4,31 Millionen Sonnenmassen bestimmt — und zwar auf wenige Prozent genau. Mit der Auflösung von “nur” einem der 8,2 Meter großen Teleskope des Very Large Telescope (VLT) ist weiterer Fortschritt jetzt aber nur noch langsam möglich. Daher soll nun das Licht aller vier Großteleskope des VLT in der chilenischen Wüste kombiniert werden, um eine Auflösung von etwa 10 Mikrobogensekunden zu erreichen — das entspricht der Größe einer Euro-Münze auf dem Mond! Damit wird es möglich sein, die Physik in der Nähe des Ereignishorizonts zu untersuchen und zu klären, ob es sich wirklich um ein schwarzes Loch handelt und welche Eigenschaften das Schwarze Loch hat.
Dr. Leonard Burtscher war ein Schüler des Gymnasiums Penzberg (Abiturjahrgang 2001), studierte dann Physik in Würzburg und Edinburgh (Schottland) und promovierte schließlich am Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg über Aktive Galaxien und Interferometrie. Derzeit ist er wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik in Garching bei München.
Making ESO’s P2PP work with a modern OS X
The most recent ESO observation preparation software P2PP 3.3.2 requires an outdated Java version (1.6). Should you have a more modern version (1.7.0_11 is the most recent one), the easiest way to make it run on a Mac is to create this path /Applications/jre/bin/ and link /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Commands/java to there, if you have it (otherwise install the old Java version). Then open the p2pp shell script and comment lines 178-209 except lines 182-183 and it should work.
Two strange and funny astronomy papers
…that are actually refereed articles or made it at least to astro-ph:
- Gates, V.; Kangaroo, E.; Roachcock, M.; Gall, W. C.: Stuperspace – a classic. If you don’t know it, read it immediately. That is, hold on a minute… First read a quantum field theory article like this to fully value the former article…
- Douglas Scott, Ali Frolop: Down-sizing Forever. An April’s fool article on astro-ph that reaches the astonishing conclusion that “the early Universe was in fact a giant galaxy”.