Wow, my last post looks so pompous in retrospect - I guess I was trying to make a point.
I have neither the brains nor patience to do research
I really don't think one needs to be that clever to do research (there are some total dullards floating around), day-to-day it's not so grand, a lot of it is really monotonous, the perks I mentioned usually only get noticed when one takes a step back to admire the view. One of my supervisors told me that a problem is a problem be it theroetical or practical. Up to a point I think it's true, even though we all have things we're best at. The hardest industrial problems can be just as difficult as the hardest research problems. To be honest, researchers are not really
smarter than others, they're possibly just more
ivory tower. Because of this, having a PhD can actually count
against one's employment prospects for jobs where one might have to do something real like helping to keep a factory running

And from that description of what you do, it's really no different to a lot of research - if a job is difficult, specialities are created to make individual jobs manageable. Someone else knows how the various infrared, optical and radio detectors and instruments work, someone else went to a far-flung mountaintop observatory to get data for me, someone else processed the data (did something to give me the neat tab-separated text files which I work with), and then I analyse it, and attempt to constrain models which someone else again worked out possibly involving simulations and fairly involved physical arguments.
Ah yes, the mysterious "Project X." When will you publish something on that?
When you perceive, by the resoluteness of your choice, the X in all things . . .
Actually, I have something coming out soon - my first paper, based on my honours, which was actually a while ago. Satisfying the referee and getting it accepted was more than trivial, but
here it isUnfortunately I was forced to write it in the most ugly way possible. All I did was find galaxies which are extremely red, many of which are massive elliptical galaxies (these are much bigger than our own galaxy, but could be considered ``red and dead", having little star formation - they mostly have old stars) at about half the lookback time to the big bang. Different models of galaxy evolution predict different properties for this population of galaxies. There are two main classes of theory for this. In one of them, massive elliptical galaxies form through the merging of other galaxies. In the other, these massive ellipticals have been around for as long as there have been galaxies. Common sense would suggest that in the former model, one should find fewer and fewer giant ellipticals as one looks further back in time/distance. So by counting the number densities of these objects, we can hopefully conclude in favour of one model over the other.
That's probably the simplest example of why these objects are interesting. On that point, our data wasn't broad enough to judge firmly. The main result of what we did was that we found that these massive ellipticals were associated with faint radio sources (signatures of star formation or black holes) in high redshift cluster environments, which wasn't unexpected, but by selecting specific cluster candidates, we suggest that the highest mass concentrations don't show this, because in the densest regions of the universe at this redshift, most star formation has already happened.
Also I introduce a smoothing algorithm I invented while I was in third year. Recently I used it to create my avatar

ZER: So when you're done it's a career in research then? Do you have any specific plans as to where it's going to be? Any certain universities that interest you and so on?
Hopefully my PhD thesis will fool someone into taking me on in research (I might have to become a lecturer, always wondered if I'd be any good at that). I'm too lazy to think about where I might want to go just yet. I don't have a problem staying where I am, but maybe a bit of a change would be a good thing. Maybe overseas, but if so hopefully not in the West, somewhere more exotic could be nice. Staying in the same place forever can be frowned upon, mixing with other groups is encouraged.
I guess another thing for me is that I'd rather not do it full time. Call me lazy, but I really think a lot of people doing full time work burn out without realising it (not to mention losing sight of what they always wanted, ceasing to read,
abandoning the SCDB, et cetera). I'd hate to simply go deeper and deeper into the research, endlessly trying to maximise my paper- and citation- counts, ending up as a world expert on something impossibly obscure, that's quite sad. Might try doing some casual programming work.