tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6374266320411149509.post8241396198116878579..comments2024-03-25T10:22:36.277-04:00Comments on Women In Astronomy: Positive ReinforcementAmanpreet Kaurhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08734178178113146899noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6374266320411149509.post-76631071579832620922009-03-29T23:58:00.000-04:002009-03-29T23:58:00.000-04:00What a good idea not to forget our original motiva...What a good idea not to forget our original motivating forces. How I became interested in Astronomy was ....<BR/><BR/>I was surrounded by family members in service professions - a nurse, a minister, a social worker. I loved science but the only living examples I had for scientific professions were a few uncles who were engineers. I studied engineering at first in college. When I was hired by Los Alamos National Lab for a summer research job, I couldn't believe that some people did research for a living. It seemed like such a luxury! How much fun!<BR/><BR/>So I steered my career towards physics. Then lo and behold - astronomy was even more fun than other sub-disciplines in physics. I still think it's fun.AANortonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05654740138652715495noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6374266320411149509.post-12378768943467613962009-03-25T12:35:00.000-04:002009-03-25T12:35:00.000-04:00Interesting! I got interested in a very similar wa...Interesting! I got interested in a very similar way. It was in my grade 12 physics class, and the teacher was very into astronomy. So, instead of doing boring, old, physics demos (you know, ball on a plane and all that sort of thing) he would use examples from astronomy.<BR/><BR/>One moment has really stuck in my mind: we were looking at gas discharge tubes with spectrographs, and he told us that if you look at stars with a spectrograph that you can tell what it's made out of.<BR/><BR/>I couldn't believe it - here are these giant balls of hot gas, light-years away, but we could find out all sorts of things from our very own planet. Definitely cool (and funny enough, both my MSc and PhD projects include spectral data - X-ray binary for my MSc, and comets for my PhD!).Alyssahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01695509619557410413noreply@blogger.com