Comment I Am an Astrophysicist (but you do not salute me) (Score 4, Insightful) 234
- Immediately: take an introductory astronomy course at a local community college or continuing education program at your local university to demonstrate your interest,
- Then: assess your IT skills, and apply them directly to the support of an upcoming large ground- or space-based observatory. This is an especially sensible route if you do any database related work. The future of astronomy is big data and massive virtual observatories which collect together and make useful petabytes of information from a wide variety of facilities.
- Check the job listings at the American Astronomical Society, looking in particular for IT support positions where your domain knowledge would outrank that of PhD-trained astronomers (who learn to program "on the job" and rarely master grittier back-end systems). Realize that almost all existing and (especially) new astronomical facilities have substantial IT/engineering staff, and that your skills do not exist among traditional PhD scientists. Example: the LSST will produce 30 TB of data per night, which needs to be processed in semi-real time. Example #2: the incredibly successful Sloan Digital Sky Survey partnered with Microsoft database engineers to build its (at the time) state-of-the-art public-facing data archive. The late Jim Gray was instrumental in building the Sloan backend, and said his favorite thing about astronomical data is that it was "worthless" (by which he meant the usual access control layers were not necessary, freeing him to focus on much more rewarding and useful tools).
- Relocate to a mission control or operations center for the facility. These are often located at major research universities, or equivalent national facilities like the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the National Radio Observatory in Charlottesville, VA, the Gemini Observatories (Hawaii/Tucson/Chile), etc. Advantage? You will very likely be immediately mixed in with groups of professional astronomers. You will be strongly encouraged to learn to speak their language, and to become more involved in the scientific aspects of the project. You will learn a great deal just through osmosis. You will likely be able to attend seminars, sit in on classes, bend the ear of willing faculty, etc. And the most significant advantage? You could be contributing directly to the forefront of astrophysics research within 3-5 years. Disadvantages: the pay might be somewhat less than similar background applied in the financial or health industries. Often the intellectual rewards bring talented engineers anyway. Also, may projects are time limited, so you positions are typically not permanent (but new projects are coming online all the time).