I'm a radio astronomer currently employed as a research assistant at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). I studied physics at the University of Manchester, then completed a PhD at Jodrell Bank Observatory before moving to Perth, Western Australia, to take up a postdoc fellowship at Curtin University.

As is the case with many astronomers, my fascination with the stars started at a young age and I joined my local astronomical society at the age of ten. Probably because of this, my research interests are somewhat broad and I will happily study anything that looks interesting - the universe is just so big and full of cool stuff! Mainly I study galaxies, usually those with high rates of star formation, but I am interested in supernovae, masers, active galactic nuclei, ultra-luminous X-ray sources and gravitational lensing, as well as exploiting new techniques such as wide-field VLBI. While I spend most of my time using radio interferometers, I often dabble in other wavelengths.

Over the years I have done a lot of public outreach, and since 2006 I have been part of the Jodcast, a podcast produced by students and postdocs based (mainly) at Jodrell Bank Observatory. I am also an occasional contributor to Astronomy.FM

Most of my professional life involves using radio interferometers such as the newly-commissioned e-MERLIN, the European VLBI Network, the Very Long Baseline Array in the US, the Long Baseline Array in Australia, and the Westerbork array here in the Netherlands. This technique of linking together telescopes can provide some of the sharpest possible pictures of our universe.

I am also currently involved in an exciting project which will combine data from the VLBA with simultaneous observations with the Chandra satellite and the soon-to-be-launched NuSTAR mission.

At home, I still have my first telescope: a 2.5-inch Russian Tal that I've had since I was seven. The optics are shocking, and it looks more like a miniature rocket launcher than a telescope, but it can still give a pretty good view of a few things. My other telescope is a small brass nautical telescope made in the 19th century which my Dad gave to me. It's not much use scientifically, but it is a beautifully made instrument.

On my desk I have a small Lenovo Thinkpad which I mainly use for writing papers and connecting to servers around the building to do my data analysis since, a lot of the time, I deal with large datasets which would never fit on my laptop's hard drive.

I still use the Texas Instruments calculator I've had since high school.

For podcasting and radio work I use an Edirol R09 recorder together with a CS-15 microphone and a mic stand from Ashton.

Much to the amusement of my colleagues, I also have an eclectic collection of inflatable planets, a model solar system on a string, a toy alien, a 5-foot rocket, and various other strange things for doing talks to kids of all ages.

I'm usually found listening to music; at work I use an ipod, at home I have a hifi.

When I'm not working I enjoy playing music too. I played drums in a Samba band when I lived in Australia, and at the moment I play guitar (a gorgeous cherry red SG) with some friends here in the Netherlands.

I use Linux for almost everything. My first computer ran Linux and I quickly discovered that I enjoy tinkering too much to ever make the switch to Windows or Mac. This turned out to be quite useful when I got to university since most of the software written for astronomy runs on *nix systems.

For data analysis I mainly use AIPS and, occasionally, CASA. I also regularly make use of TopCat and Aladin, often together, especially when working on wide-field projects with hundreds of sources in one field.

I often keep in touch with collaborators around the world (and in the building) via Skype.

For writing papers and notes (and *shudder* editing postscript files) I use nano, vim or emacs, although I still find post-it notes invaluable for keeping my projects organised - my office wall is something of a visual to-do list of pictures, plots and post-it notes. My papers and observing proposals are all formatted with LaTeX.

All of my audio projects are edited and post-processed in Audacity.

As an undergraduate I learned to program in C, but later discovered Perl and it became my default language during my PhD because I found it much faster for quick hacks.

Last summer, while helping with the commissioning of e-MERLIN, I discovered Python and learned to use ParselTongue in order to script much of the process of data analysis from the new correlator. Scripting AIPS can be painful at times, but ParselTongue/Python makes it almost pleasant.

Well, aside from a relativity-defying spaceship so I could actually go and see what's going on inside messy, dusty starburst galaxies with my own eyes and still be back in time for tea.... there are so many exciting new facilities in development right now.

Being mainly a radio astronomer, I am of course really looking forward to the SKA and its precursors: ASKAP and MeerKAT. The various science questions which these telescopes are being designed to answer are really important ones, but what is the most exciting prospect to me (as with any new telescope) is the discovery of the unknown - those objects that we have no idea are even there right now because our current telescopes are just not sensitive enough to detect them.

I'm a PhD student at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics at NYU. I'm working with David W. Hogg on various projects involving next generation data analysis.

I've been formally trained thus far as a physicist but I also spend a lot of time studying and thinking about machine learning, engineering and computer science. In particular, I'm interested in how research in these fields can help us in astronomy.

I also recently released a Python package called emcee for doing efficient MCMC that has been useful for quite a few projects already.

Besides astronomy, I do some web development and I try to get out rock climbing as much as I can.

You can find me online @__dfm__, danfm.ca and github.com/dfm.

I mostly work with imaging data from SDSS but I'm excited about starting to work with lightcurves from Kepler too.

I use my 13-inch MacBook Pro for all my research and side projects but I think I'll move to the smaller MacBook Air for my next computer. I've always been a Mac user so that's where I feel most comfortable but I have no problem running my code on the Linux boxes at NYU or in the Cloud.

I've been using Heroku quite a bit for my web-based projects and I love their simple but powerful interface.

I spend about 50% of my time in Chrome and 25% coding in MacVim (as measured by some Python code that I wrote to measure my productivity). The remaining 25% of the time is spent in Skype (2-body problem), Preview (even though it is a huge memory hog) and Keynote (still the best presentation software I've used).

I used to be a huge Quicksilver fan but I've recently switched to Alfred and couldn't be happier. I wrote a web app that lets you do very fast author/year ADS searches from Alfred (or Quicksilver) which has also become a necessary part of my setup.

In the past, I used a hacked version of Adobe CS for design but after I forgot to turn on Little Snitch and got busted for my evil ways, I've switched to Pixelmator for most purposes... I just wish that I could find a decent replacement for Illustrator.

I use git (+GitHub) for version control—I version control everything—, zsh as my shell and vim as my development environment. Naturally, my dotfiles are available to be forked [github.com/dfm/dotfiles and github.com/dfm/.vim] and I distribute them across all the machines that I work on. I recently fell in love with z even though some of my colleagues think that it's proof that I'm lazy.

I do most of my programming in Python (see below) with a Homebrew installed Python distribution and a virtualenv for each of the projects that I'm working on. I've given up on the Enthought Python Distribution... pip  is awesome!

I use Python for all my research until things get too computationally expensive and I have to start coding in C (hand-wrapped using the Python-C-API, of course). My usual stack consists of numpy, scipy, matplotlib, h5py and (naturally) emcee.

I've also been using MongoDB and redis as database backends for my data analysis pipeline.

I was lucky enough to start using Python near the beginning of my research career so I've become very comfortable with it but I had some experience with C, C++, Objective-C and FORTRAN before that and my knowledge of those languages has proven useful on many occasions.

I would still advise any other young researchers to learn Python (if they only had time for one) because it's awesome and gaining traction (e.g. AstroPy).

In my "spare time", I have a few web apps in the works based on Flask  + MongoDB in the backend and lovingly hand-crafted HTML+CSS+Java(coffee)script on the front end.

One piece of advice: don't forget to "Document Everything(TM)".

I'm quite happy with my setup these days but a MacBook Air with a 4G connection wouldn't hurt much. It would also be great to work on more projects in the cloud. While I am excited about upcoming missions, I'm already pretty stoked about the amount of publicly available dataset that need to be mined.

URL: astronomy.ua.edu/keel

Twitter: NGC3314

I occasionally blog for Galaxy Zoo.

I started as an amateur astronomer, with a 15-cm backyard telescope that I bought secondhand with money from mowing lawns. The mirrors got larger as I worked my way up - undergraduate work at Vanderbilt, including many nights working with their 60-cm telescope; grad school at UCSC, with something like 100 nights on Lick instruments, and postdocs at Kitt Peak and Leiden. For almost 25 years I've been at the University of Alabama.

My science interests are probably a little too broad for my own good - AGN, galaxy interactions, dust in galaxies, galaxy evolution. Unlike many of your respondents, I have the fortune to be a fairly senior faculty member. I note how liberating this can be in comparison, with, for example, many other members of the Galaxy Zoo team - I can choose to pursue projects on longer timescales or with less guaranteed payoffs, not having to worry much about the career repercussions of a particular publication rate (although of course papers and funding do a lot to keep me productive and our administration happy).

I have managed to become multispectral over time - I've used Chandra, Swift, FUSE, GALEX, IUE, HST, Spitzer, ISO, and processed data from Voyager 2, IRAS, and Einstein. Still, my roots are in ground-based optical work. That's made me a fairly regular observer at NOAO facilities for almost 30 years now, alternating between imaging a spectroscopic applications. (I really miss the DensePAK fiber array at the WIYN telescope, combining these with good surface-brightness sensitivity). Since our institution joined the SARA consortium, as the most active optical observer, I've ended up using most of the 30 nights/year per remote 0.6-1m telescope we have.

I'm really interested in delegating as more of our students are trained to use them. I've used enough telescopes over the years that I have a web page to keep track.

Unlike many colleagues, I'm still an amateur (as well), with a 125mm Celestron and a 25-cm Dobsonian cluttering up my house. When we did some renovation, I had our back deck extended to give me better lines of sight between the trees into the southern sky.

I made the switch to a MacBook Pro about 5 years ago. It's great to have 95% of my tasks done on one machine (this, plus a fast home wireless connection, has kept me going when chaos attacked). Virtually all my data processing can be done on it; there are only a few niche things that require other systems. I do keep an SGI O2 (13 years old and running) plus Linux and Windows boxes in my office for that other fraction of tasks (for remote observing at the SARA instruments, data retrieval is smoother with Windows applications, and the extra virtual-machine layer on the Mac is pretty slow).

Not exactly hardware, but I would be remiss not to acknowledge the enormous value of the vast and self-organizing pattern-recognition network formed by the hundreds of thousands of citizen science volunteers of Galaxy Zoo!

If you want other areas of life, well, a Holton bass trombone has played a key role in keeping me more or less sane for a long time. I still play at least weekly in a church orchestra, and used to be in a ballroom dance band whose leader thought it was funny to give me a melody line on "Fly Me to the Moon", "Stardust", "Stars Fell on Alabama", and so on.

IRAF, IDL. (Historical note - I was a temporary member of a committee to work out the spectroscopic processing capabilities of the initial release of IRAF, which probably gave me some kind of prejudice, although in an undisclosed direction). Much of my work involves very different kinds of analysis, so these general-purpose tools are especially valuable (as opposed to what works best in developing a pipeline).

I'm such a dinosaur that I think of Fortran 77 as the new version. That's still my most native actual language; I can read and modify C, and do very simple things in Python and SQL. (This brings up the flamebait question of what is and isn't an actual language). What I think of as scripting-style tools have come so far that they take over more and more of the functions I one associated with, for example, Fortran and C.

I still advise students to be familiar with some full-blown programming language - someday, you'll need to do a simple manipulation which IDL won't quite handle. After a couple of decades, I tend to rely on just using familiar tools to get things done - to me, the appeal of the latest and greatest is muted if I'm sure it will be superseded before I have a need to master its greatness.

My vision is fuzzy, so I'm no good on these forward-look exercises. In the near term, I constantly carp that it's the 21st century, so why do we still need to waste our time dealing with (figure placement in LaTeX, compressing figure files for arxiv.org, being confused by command format differences between IRAF and IDL, needing to add reduction layers for error propagation, fill in your peeve here).

I've long been a major fan of open-access facilities, and continue to argue for their importance. For many problems, we aren't necessarily limited by collecting area or data volume, it's brains.

I am the Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. I have a warrant signed by the Queen. No, really, its on my wall. She signs herself "R" for Regina.

I did my PhD in Leicester in the year mutter mutter and have since worked at MIT, RGO, Queen Mary College (now QMUL), and Edinburgh. I started life as an X-ray astronomer and drifted on in turn to optical, infra-red, and sub-mm astronomy. You will note I am losing energy with the years. Toujours le meme histoire.

My first love is Active Galactic Nuclei, though I have flirted with cosmology. In recent years I have been into Big Surveys and the Virtual Observatory. For a few years I have written a blog called The e-Astronomer. For about a year it was read by seven people and a dog. Then I wrote something political about the STFC financial crisis and it went mad for a bit. It has calmed down since but the dog still drops in.

I love Twitter. I hate Facebook, but hey, how else do you know what your kids are up to ?

Anything and everything over the years... AGN have a habit of radiating at all possible wavelengths.

Currently, together with various collaborators and students I am working with ESO VLT VIMOS spectra, WISE mid-IR data, and Pan Starrs-1 monitoring combined with the Liverpool Telescope. The PS1-LT stuff involves looking for tidal disruption events. When you get to about 21st mag and below, the sky is just boiling with variability...

However, above all else the last decade of my life has been dominated by one instrument - the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM), which is what we use to carry out the UKIDSS survey. The concepts for the instrument and the survey emerged together around 1998, and the survey has been going on since 2005. UKIRT is a fantastic machine. Its currently in danger of closing down, after we finsih UKIDSS later this year.

Most of my life is run from a 13" MacBook Pro. I don't have a separate desktop machine. The MacBook travels with me everyday everywhere, but at work it drives two ginormous monitors. I do lightweight data analysis as well as the usual office and webby stuff on my laptop. Most heavy duty stuff is run on a server somewhere - for example, running SQL queries on UKIDSS - or occasionally I connect to networked linux boxes around the ROE. To be honest, my student and postdoc look after most of the non-public data I am involved with. The main current exception is the Liverpool Telescope monitoring data, which is slowly piling up on my laptop.

I have a completely dumb eight quid phone. Until recently I didn't have a mobile phone at all, until my kids moaned enough. I used to run my life with a Palm Life Drive, and before that a Psion 3, but these days I feel no need for anything except my laptop. The Life Drive still works, but I only use it for playing Patience. I don't like the idea of multiple boxes, which is why I don't have separate laptop and desktop. For a while it looked like the iPad might finally be the Convergent Machine, but actually its pretty much a consumer toy. Aesthetically, I want one, but I know I have to resist that.

Somewhere in some dark cupboard I still have my 1987 MacPlus...

For daily office and organisation stuff I use pretty much standard Mac stuff - Applemail, iCal, Addressbook. Webwise I oscillate aimlessly between Firefox and Chrome.

For writing, I find myself returning more and more to LaTeX after some years of Word and Pages and Open Office. Philosophically I like Open Office of course but aesthetically I'd rather chew me own foot off. You still have to use Word to work with administrators of course.

For playing with data the tools I find myself using most often are Topcat, Aladin, Gaia, and Gnuplot. I have Python open in a terminal as a calculator most of the time. I load up my own standard list of constants and simple functions so I can just type 2*G*1e9*Msun/c**2 or whatever. I also quite often run webby things, like SQL queries in WSA, or SDSS Navigator. For organising literature I use Mendeley. I used to use Zotero but can't remember why I swapped..

I am not a theorist, but in recent times I have done a lot of running photo-ionisation models with Gary Ferland's Cloudy code.

English ! I like working with software engineers. I do my job, and they do theirs. Of course I can be a script bunny like anybody else. I hack the odd bit of Python, and write a fair number of Gnuplot scripts and SQL scripts.

Back in the ancient mists of time, the first language I ever learned (at high school) was Algol68. It was a thing of beauty. Then as a PhD student I learned Fortran like everyone else.

Later in life I tried to get myself up to date by learning C and Java but I really hated them, especially Java. Most of the professional computing world is, for good reasons, dominated by an object-oriented mindset, and requires a lot of rigour. But what you want to do in daily astronomical life is procedural, algorithmic, and often you want a quick lash up. Java is nothing like English, and a bad fit to algorithmic thinking.

Then when I tried Python I was pleasantly surprised to find it relatively easy and forgiving, and adaptable to either object oriented or procedural thinking. But its still not quite right. I think we are still waiting for someone to write the perfect scientific scripting language.

SQL is a different mindset again : its declarative. You state the outcome you want and the DBMS works out how to actually achieve it. Knowing how to code queries is an essential skill for the modern observer, and it will grow in importance for some years. However, what strikes me is that it is dead simple for short queries, and incomprehensibly Byzantine for very complex queries. In various places a lot of thought is going on about how to make improved ways of working with databases. The new PhD student should be keeping an eye out for this.

LSST ! I want it now please !

Also, I would like a super powerful zapper that can temporarily remove the HI in a narrow tube in any chosen direction, so I can see what the feck is actually going on in in quasars at 300 Angstrom.

My name is Franck Marchis and I am a Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute. I got my Ph.D. in 2000 at the University of Toulouse, France after having worked for my graduate years at the UNAM in Mexico City, University College London in England and the  ESO-La Silla Observatory in Chile for 5 years. I moved into the US as a postdoc at University of California at Berkeley in 2000, a few weeks after my finalizing my Ph.D. In 2003 I became an associate astronomer at the Department of Astronomy of UC Berkeley.

Since 2000, I have used large telescopes, eight to 10 meters across, to study the bodies in our solar system with special emphasis on the volcanic activity of Io, the atmosphere of Jupiter, and multiple asteroids. I participated in the development of adaptive optics (AO) on ground-based telescopes, techniques which help astronomers see details on faraway objects by correcting the blurring due to Earth’s atmosphere. These past two decades are indeed the renaissance of planetary astronomy, since using ground-based telescopes equipped with these innovative AO techniques, astronomers are capable of recording images as good as those taken by space telescopes and space missions.

Last year in June 2011, I moved to the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute to expand my research to the field of extra-solar planetary science, or the study of planets around other stars known as exoplanets. I am involved in several instrumentation projects to design new generation AO which will have the potential of imaging and characterized exoplanets. Several directions are being considered to achieve this task.

Our group is developing an extreme AO system specifically dedicated to this scientific goal named the Gemini Planet Imager built for the Gemini South Telescope which will have its first light at the end of 2012. We are testing FIRST@LICK a new instrument based on innovative technique called fibered imager that mounted for the first time on the Lick Shane-3m telescope in 2010. Also, international consortiums are starting building large telescopes with aperture of 30 meters or more (the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope) equipped with AO systems capable of reaching a sensitivity allowing astronomer to detect of Earth-like exoplanets. This is indeed the golden age of ground-based astronomy as we are now able to see seasonal or unpredictable changes on planets and their satellites as well from the ground as from space.

Because of those past stays in various places in the world, I speak fluently French, Spanish and English. For personal reasons, I took the endeavor of learning Czech, but I must admit that I am not quite successful yet.

I have a passion for my work which is devouring most of my time but I also share my interest for a large numbers of topics (science in general, education, politics, environment) through my Twitter account (@AllPlanets) and the Cosmic Diary blog. My new web page will go live by mid April: http://www.fmarchis.seti.org/

I use mostly the 3 large telescopes: the W.M. Keck-II telescope equipped with an AO system, a near-infrared camera (NIRC2), the VLT-UT4 Yepun telescope and its AO system  NACO, and the Gemini North Telescope and its AO system ALTAIR. I have also used in the past the first Multi-Conjugate AO system (MAD) mounted on the VLT telescope.

My students also help me in my research by conducting observations with the IRTF-3m telescope, the Lick telescopes  (1-m and 3-m) & the super-LOTIS robotic telescope at Kitt Peak.

Finally, I collaborate with a large group of professional astronomers to collect data using the SOAR-4.1m telescope, the WHT-4.2m, the PROMPT robotic telescopes in Chile, as well as amateur astronomers’ telescopes around the world.

I decided to standardize my group network by using only Apple Computers. We have a small network of six Mac OS 10.6 computers spread between SETI Institute, UC Berkeley, and our home offices which communicate which each others. It is not always working as well as I planned since I never studied computer science, but the system fits our needs. We also got time on the NASA supercomputer clusters to run intensive simulations of spacecraft trajectories around multiple asteroid systems.

I recently acquired an iPad to force me to read again since I noticed that I was spending too much time in front of my computer and not enough reading books and magazines.

Today since I spend most of my time writing grants, managing my research group and presenting our results in talks and conferences, my main tools are now Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

I listen to my music thanks to Pandora in my office and also a lot of podcast about science (Planetary Science podcast, Big Picture Science) and history, politics or video games (mostly in French from our public radio network).

We use Dropbox to share our data, and the Apple tools (iCal, Agenda, Mail) to organize our research (not always successful). My browser is now Chrome; I finally did the transition a few weeks ago.  

Mendeley is my favorite software to manage publications. I would love to learn to use FreeMind to take notes during conferences. Since I work in the GPI consortium, I will have to learn as well to use project management applications such as Redmine.

I learned Interactive Data Language (IDL) when I was a student so I am stuck with this language to write my data analysis programs and my models. I have an extensive library of sub-routines that I developed over the past 15 years, so it is difficult to start again from scratch.

I however forced my students to learn Python 2.6 and to write their programs in this language since I think that it could be useful for them in the future. Consequently I have a bit of knowledge of Python.

When I was 17 yrs old, I was coding in Language 6502 and 6800, Assembler and C, so I have the feeling that my coding skill went down with the years.

In the future, I will most likely switch completely to Python, but for this I need time and a lot of motivation (e.g. teaching a class).

A dream telescope and instrument is of course a telescope larger than 30 meters in diameter on the top of Mauna Kea or in Chile equipped with an extreme AO system capable of collecting images and spectra in visible and near-infrared with an angular resolution of 7 milli-arcsec. With such instrument we will be able to see the highest temperature of the Ionian volcanoes, and thus infer the composition of its lava; see surface changes on Titan due to the methane cycle; detect small (1 km) moons around asteroids in the main belt; image and map the surface of large trans-neptunian objects; and finally detect Earth-like exoplanets in orbit around nearby stars. 

I could also mention that an array of small (1-2m) robotic telescopes spread around the planet capable of recording data remotely could be as well interesting for my research since it may allow us to observe at any time any part of the sky. We could share such a facility with schools and universities to help students to understand what modern astronomy is about.

A dream hardware and software setup could be a network of computers with ultra high-speed connections (>1 Gb/s), allowing storage of 100 Tb of dematerialized data. It is getting more and more difficult for us to work on and exchange our data and to exchange, so cheap clouding and ultra fast access is key for the future of our research.

I am originally Swedish, grew up in Switzerland where I studied physics engineering. I then moved to the UK to complete my PhD in cosmology at Cambridge. After that I worked a bit for UNESCO and as a tutor/teaching assistant at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town, South Africa. I was a postdoc in Rome briefly, then I joined the University of Leiden in the Netherlands to set up what was just an idea back then: Universe Awareness (UNAWE).

UNAWE is an astronomy education and outreach programme that aims to stimulate young children's development. The programme was a global cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009 and in 2010 we got a big EU grant to continue it.

I left the Netherlands mid 2012 and joined the South African Astronomical Observatory as an SKA research fellow and then became Director of Academic Development at the AIMS - Next Einstein Initiative.

Now, I am about to have a baby (yay!) and will figure out what to do next in a few months' time.

I occasionally blog at http://carolune.org, and tweet lots as @carolune about science, technology, education and development, the interface I inhabit since 2005.

During my days as an active researcher I was always on the theoretical side so I didn't really use any telescopes directly but I did use as much CMB data as possible. WMAP is still the reference and Planck will be the next.

I have visited the telescopes in South Africa a lot. The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is the biggest single dish optical telescope of the Southern Hemisphere and has just started functioning as per its specs. What a beautiful machine!

KAT 7 (& MeerKAT), South Africa's pathfinder telescope to the SKA is simply fantastic! I'm a huge fan of the work of the SKA engineers. Many other telescopes reside in the beautiful Karoo desert of South Africa, both radio and optical/IR instruments (PAPER, C-BASS, LCOGT, SuperWASP, etc.). If you ever visit the area, you'll see why: There is no light pollution, no radio interference (no cell phone signal for miles - love being offline sometimes) it's perfect!

I have always been most comfortable on Mac and Unix. Since they came together in 2003/4 with Mac OS X, it's been a delight to be able to code as on any unix box as well as do all the 'office stuff' on the same machine with the nicest interface around.

During my PhD I built myself a solid linux box to run my codes on and that machine lived a long and productive life!

Nowadays I live online mostly, so I should add to my hardware list my iPhone and iPad. And my cameras: Nikon D300 and D3100, lenses Sigma 10-20mm, Nikkor 20mm and 50mm, Nikon DX 35mm and 105mm.

I do a lot of photography and it has a lot to do with physics! I love capturing the sky at night, atmospheric phenomena, any cool optical phenomena - single shots or timelapse photography. In fact I find photography a very powerful way to communicate science: photos can be beautiful and they don't distort science - no need for pseudo science! Also, you can capture a fleeting phenomenon (green flash!) and keep it forever :)

My email client (Apple Mail), a bunch of web apps, mostly google apps: mail, calendar, docs, reader, g+, etc., twitter clients, facebook clients. TextMate or BBEdit for coding. Web servers and CMSs (Wordpress mostly -I hack some web stuff). Processing for visualization. Photoshop and Graphic Converter. MS Office suite & iWork.  GarageBand and iMovie.

I used to use C and Perl lots but that was ages ago. Since even longer ago I've been using various flavours of HTML, php, mySQL. Now that's still useful. I've dabbled in Python and Javascript. I really enjoy Processing (java based).

Hardware: The SKA in Africa :) I love where I live and I am hugely inspired by the people I am surrounded by. South Africa is a country with such hope in its own potential and tremendous government support for its scientific community. I would love to see the SKA come to Africa because people here would make the most of it. And really, when was the last time you walked into an astronomy department and everyone is inspired by what's happening in the whole country whether they're part of it or not? Remember the old tale of the NASA janitor who, when asked by some US president what he was doing replied 'I'm helping send people to the moon'? That's what the vibe is like around the SKA in South Africa and in Africa.

Software: I'm quite happy as is but this is what I wish for the future: lean, bandwidth-efficient online interfaces to major scientific software packages to enable African (and any developing world) scientists to take part in 'heavy-duty' science (big data, CPU-expensive, etc.) without having to own their own high performance computing centres, widespread gigabit internet, etc. because in fact, it's not necessary. I'd love to see PhD students launch huge MHD simulations from smartphones and be able to monitor their runs, visualize results, etc. It's feasible, we just need to think a little less like 10 years ago :)

I am a graduate student in astronomy (University of Virginia) finishing up my thesis in the next few months. My focus has always been in radio astronomy, and I am also very interested in science education and outreach.

When I should be writing my thesis, I may also be blogging at http://noisyastronomer.com or tweeting or doing hands-on astronomy activities with school children.

My first astronomy project used the Very Long Baseline Array, a set of ten identical radio dishes spread across North America. It was so cool to use a telescopes that is literally the size of the Earth to make incredibly detailed maps of distant radio galaxies! I was never quite comfortable with "regular" optical telescopes after that.

I have also used the Very Large Array, the Green Bank Telescope, and for the last few years I've been helping to build a new telescope called PAPER, the Precision Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization. This low frequency array differs from even the classical idea of a dish radio telescope in that it is essentially a field of dipoles made from copper poles, aluminum plates, PVC, and steel mesh.

I have a Linux box on my desk at my department, another one at the observatory, and space on an even more powerful one in the same building.

Our project also uses time and space on a computing cluster at one of our universities to process our ever-growing data sets.

I have some astronomy processing software on my MacBook as well, which comes in use when I'm traveling, and it is where I do all my thesis writing. I don't know why, but it feels much more comfortable!

Like a big dork, I also have an iPad and an Android phone, both of which are used to frantically check email when I'm away from my computer(s). The iPad is also great for blogging and taking notes on the road!

LaTeX has become my best friend while thesis writing, either in vim or TexShop. And when I can't figure out how to do something in LaTeX, Google becomes my best friend.

I use VNC to pop in and out between my various computers as needed while on Linux or Mac and Evernote to keep up with it all.

In the background, I'm usually listening to music or podcasts with Spotify, DogCatcher, or iTunes. And when I need a break, Tweetdeck is always there to let me chat with my friends!

Also, I always have Papers2 open so that I can get the library of research papers that I've saved for reference. When I need to focus, I use WriteOrDie and/or Freedom, one which encourages you to keep the words flowing or else it starts to play rather unpleasant noises. The latter cuts off your computer's internet connection so you can stop fooling around and focus!

For simple plotting and scripting, I use IDL. I've made several forays into Python, but I still have a way to go! HTML and CSS are great for web development, though for the most part I just use Wordpress.

As for astronomy packages, I "grew up" with AIPS, the classic astronomical imaging package for radio interferometers. Though it still holds a special place in my heart, I've moved on to CASA, the next generation of such software. I also use Aipy, which is a python-based interferometry code written specifically for our project by a collaborator at Berkeley. Other times, I'll use DS9 (http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9) to muck about with images if CASA, AIPS, or Aipy can't do it.

A chip implanted on my brain that runs on thought alone. That would be pretty sweet. Maybe I'll settle for a smartphone interface built into my wrist. Cyborg me!

My dream telescope would probably be a Square Kilometer Array on the Moon. Thousands of radio telescopes scanning the whole radio spectrum, making maps constantly, and without the distracting effects of the atmosphere. Also, trip to the Moon! But then I'd have to shut off my wrist-phone in order to not cause interference with our observations.

I'm an astronomy postdoc and systems engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. I moved there in late 2010, and was previously a postdoc at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, a press office intern at ESO, a PhD student and (briefly) an engineer at University College London.

I spend 50-70% of my time working on instrumentation projects, mostly at the boundary between science and technology - modelling instrument performance, testing, calibrating and coordinating design efforts. My professional home page is http://www.mpia.de/~kendrew.

The other half of my time I spend doing research on high mass star formation in our galaxy. I currently work on an exciting citizen science project called Milky Way Project.

I'm an active blogger (http://sarahaskew.net), and I tweet as @sarahkendrew. I'm one of the organisers of the .Astronomy conference.

Milky Way Project is built around images from the Spitzer Glimpse and Mipsgal surveys, so I'm spending much time with these datasets at the moment. Intrumentation-wise, I tend to live a few (or many!) years in the future.

I currently work as a systems engineer on GRAVITY, a second generation infrared instrument for the VLT Interferometer, and I'm a member of the test team for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope. I've also spent some years working on a design study for European Extremely Large Telescope(E-ELT) instrumentation.

My work computers are a 27" iMac and a 13" MacBook Pro, each with fairly standard configurations, as I don't do any heavy lifting computation-wise.

My smartphone, an HTC Wildfire S, doubles as my on-the-go music device. I don't run many apps on it - mainly email, twitter and a few news sites. I used to have an iPhone, but as I have no use for such a powerful computer with a tiny screen I downgraded to something simpler and cheaper.

I only switched to Mac a year ago; before that I used Windows. A lot of mechanical or optical design software is optimised for Windows or Linux, so most instrumentalists use one of these operating systems rather than Mac. I found Windows surprisingly workable for research, although it usually took me longer to find out how to get astronomy-specific software up and running, as there'd be no documentation for Windows users. I made the switch to Mac as I was increasingly using Linux over a slow VNC connection for work. I like the Unix environment, and the reasons for using Windows professionally more or less disappeared. Also: the MacBook Pro is lighter than a PC laptop with similar performance, and (vanity!) it looks so good. And if I need Windows now, we have PCs in the lab that run it.

My main hardware for entertainment consists of my Kindle or a good book, running shoes, yoga mat, coffee machine, and on occasions: a bottle opener.

I've been a big fan of Dropbox for some years now to keep computers in sync, and I use Evernote on a daily basis for taking meeting notes, keeping my research logs and clipping interesting links that I might want to write about. For both of these, I recently upgraded to premium accounts - both to get the extra services but also to support their development, which I think is important.

I pay for unlimited backup space with Mozy, for extra backup security on top of my Time Machine setup.

I look forward to the day that I get my own personal assistant, but for now I organise my professional and personal task lists with Remember the Milk, which is nice but misses some features I'd like. I'm currently looking around for a replacement.

I do all my coding and LaTeX writing in TextMate, which I really like - and I suspect that I don't even use 10% of its features!

I'm trying to be disciplined about version control, and use Git for the code I write for my research; for instrument documentation at MPIA we use Subversion (svn).

I keep my papers organised with Mendeley.

Other software I like: TopCat for working with catalogues, sometimes linked up with Aladin over SAMP for added VO awesomeness; gnuplot for making figures.

My blog uses Wordpress.org (the self-hosted one), which I'm very happy with as I'm not really a web "power user". After a bit of experimenting, I've realised that it's worth paying a bit of money for a good Wordpress framework or theme if you're not a skilled designer. My blog uses the Genesis framework from Studiopress, which is very well supported, flexible, comprehensive, and comes with very nice-looking child themes built on it.

I mainly code in IDL, and recently in Python. The jury isn't out yet on the IDL vs. Python debate for me, but I'm definitely enjoying getting to grips with Python. Visualization is a big plus for Python: matplotlib and Aplpy make it easy to produce nice plots and images. Python has an extremely active and engaged user base: when I tweet about problems I'm having, I always get really helpful responses from people all over the world.

In the past I've also coded in Matlab, and to a lesser extent in C, C++ and Octave. The only course I ever failed at university was Fortran, so I try to stay away from that!

I'm obviously very excited about the instruments that I work on myself coming online - GRAVITY around 2014-2015, James Webb now in 2018. But I hope that the advent of the large scale facilities currently under development - SKA, the ELTs - don't end up killing off the smaller observatories. I think there's dearth of simple workhorse instruments, in particular spectrographs, that can do great science on modest-sized telescopes given good spectroscopic capabilities: moderate to high spectral resolution, and multi-object or IFU capabilities.

The near infrared in particular should be covered better, particularly now that ESO will be retiring two of their IR instruments on VLT in the next couple of years.

Software-wise, I might dream of two types of setup.

First: better instrument modelling. That includes more support for it from the outset in instrumentation projects. We don't spend enough time studying an instrument's performance once it's on sky, and there's much to learn.

Also, I would like scientific papers to become more than just PDFs that passively provides us with information on a research result. Our journals do a decent job already of providing machine readable tables and links to catalogues and datasets, but we can do much more. For example, providing a workflow integrated with the paper, that allows readers to run through the work with the authors' code and interact with the data as they read; allowing interactive or non-static graphics. Some kind of organised post-publication peer review even?

My name is Josh Peek, I am a Hubble Fellow at Columbia University. I did my graduate work at UC Berkeley primarily on neutral gas in the Galactic Halo and a large survey of neutral gas in our Galaxy with the ALFA instrument on the Arecibo 305 meter radio telescope.

My work now is mostly about the diffuse interstellar and intergalactic medium. (Both are terms I dislike -- why can't we call it outer space and be done with it? It's like calling the ocean the inter-fish milieu!) I study it using the 21-cm transition of neutral Hydrogen in the radio, thermal dust emission in the far IR, high-resolution absorption-line spectroscopy in optical, high precision photometry in the optical, and shadowing in the X-ray.

I work closely with simulators who investigate Galaxy formation on the largest scales as well as those who study the details of the interstellar medium more locally.

You can find more about me at astro.columbia.edu/~jpeek, or follow me at @joshuaegpeek on Twitter.

My bread and butter is the ALFA instrument on Arecibo. I am an avid user of the telescope commensally, which is to say my team has developed methods of taking vast quantities of data whilst others are observing; I believe we have more Arecibo hours on sky than any other group in the world.

I have also done 21-cm work on the VLA and GBT, and done some broad-band work on the VLBA and the now-defunct BIMA.

I am involved with projects using the Herschel space telescope and COS on Hubble.

I have also done some observing with the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the Lick telescope in California, using high-resolution optical spectrographs.

For my day-to-day work I am certainly part of the cult of Mac, and have been since the earliest days (I remember when OS 7.6.1 was the height of civilization). I use a 17 inch MBP as my main computer, and hook it up to a larger monitor when I am at work. I find that having desktop area is important to me, although I wouldn't mind something lighter.

When I need more computing power I log into the servers we run at UC Berkeley, a group of multiproc linux boxes with dozens of TB of storage for raw data and data products.

I use an iPad, iPhone, and a pair of QC2 Bose noise-canceling headphones (although, sound freak that I am, I prefer a pair of Sennheiser 565s when I am not traveling).

I have an Xperia Arc I use as a testbed for Android code.

I am writing this in a text editor called TextWrangler, which has the amazing feature of being able to read and save over an sftp link in a way that is transparent to the user. I do a lot of work over VNC, using Vine Viewer or CotVNC (both tunneled through ssh), so I need something to edit the many codes I have running on remote machines.

For version control I use Dropbox, Subversion, and Mercurial, which is at least one too many, but one has to do whatever one's collaborators are doing, unfortunately.

I use many Google products, especially docs and sites. I find keeping a running "diary" online of what I am doing is helpful, and it is easy to create a network of blogs on Google sites.

I have not settled on a single main way to do remote conferencing, but all are rather easy, so I swap between them as different collaborations choose different modes.

I have become a bit of a devotee of OmniFocus for organization, and I sync between my phone and my computer to keep track of my tasks and projects.

I also am a huge fan of Papers. The current version (2.1) allows you to organize all your papers, sync them to iOS devices, and highlight both on the tablet and on the laptop. It also has this manuscripts feature that allows inserting of LaTeX or WYSIWYG citations extremely easily. For instance, I inserted this one (Peek, J.E.G., Graves, G.J. (2010). The Astrophysical Journal, 719(1), 415–424. dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/719/1/415) with 5 keystrokes and without using the mouse.

I also use Adobe Illustrator a lot. Many people will tell you that you can get away with using open source vector manipulation programs to make pretty figures, posters, and other visual displays of data. Hogwash. Adobe Illustrator is the right tool for these jobs, and investing in being proficient and fast in it is well worth your time.

I have also found myself using NASA's Viewpoints software, which is amazing for visualizing multidimensional data.

Code wise, I lean heavily on IDL, but I am branching out into other languages: Python is the main language to which I hope to fully transition, Processing for Android and interactive graphic implementation, R for real-deal statistics. I have used AIPS, but try my best to avoid it.

I think it is time for undergrads and grads to learn Python as a primary language, but to have some proficiency in IDL do deal with the vast swaths of code still only in that language.

Processing is an easy to use environment for Java that is the industry standard for interactive graphics and fully flexible data visualization. It can write nice little android apps and acts as a nice hacker's tool in a lot of situations.

While many statistics packages are written for other languages, R is very much the standard used by statisticians; Documentation for packages often come in the form of refereed papers in statistics. It is easy to use, intuitive, and has the simplest package import system I have ever used for any language.

Being multilingual is sometimes a real pain, but there simply is no one language that does everything you want.

I think the thing that needs to change most about our hardware and software setup is the input mechanism. The way we interact with computers is simply physically unhealthy, and I would like something that uses more of my body and is also more intuitive.

Additionally, tools for data visualization need to be easier to make, use, and manipulate. We have an ever-growing supply of data, and we need better tools to interpret it.

From the standpoint of astronomy, I would love to see more all-sky surveys of the interstellar medium (ISM) in different wavebands — a high-res version of WHAM or a very detailed, multi-wavelength study of the interstellar medium of the Andromeda galaxy would be an amazing boon to our knowledge of the ISM.

I am very excited for the Square Kilometer Array, which will revolutionize all of radio astronomy.