Eustace Tilley Views our Profession: The Astronomer as Portrayed in the Cartoons of The New Yorker Magazine

Details Eustace Tilley Views our Profession: The Astronomer as Portrayed in the Cartoons of The New Yorker Magazine Eustace Tilley Views our Profession: The Astronomer as Portrayed in the Cartoons of The New Yorker Magazine

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...20922003r&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #220.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society,

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Astronomy has always enjoyed broad public appeal, as evidenced by the extensive media attention given to the recent "demotion" of Pluto by the IAU. While public planetaria and college courses provide limited outreach, most members of the public have little formal exposure to astronomy as a scientific discipline. Consequently, public opinion as to what astronomers do is largely shaped by the news media and by popular culture.
One icon of "elite" popular culture is The New Yorker magazine. Founded by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, The New Yorker was intended to be a sophisticated cosmopolitan humor magazine. The first issue appeared on newsstands on February 17, 1925. While humor was always an important aspect of the magazine, The New Yorker quickly established itself as a forum for serious journalism and fiction. It currently boasts a worldwide circulation of well over one million readers.
For many readers the cartoons are the highlight of each issue of The New Yorker, and since its first issue more than 70,000 have appeared in print. These have been analyzed to see how professional astronomers are typically portrayed. Not surprisingly, the average reader would conclude that observational astronomy is done almost exclusively at visible wavelengths with ground-based telescopes, usually large-aperture refractors which protrude through the slit of a traditional hemispherical dome. In a few cases the artist has been inspired by a real (and readily recognizable) telescope. Radio and space-based telescopes are rarely cartoon subjects. The professional astronomer is typically portrayed as a middle-aged male, unfortunate when one considers the large representation of women in our field. Amateur astronomy appears with surprising frequency, but rarely as a serious pursuit. Finally, astronomical objects (Pluto, Halley's comet, etc.) frequently appear as cartoon subjects when they have been in the news, but rarely otherwise.

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