Course overview
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Priya's Thursday, two ways

9 lessons · 28 prompts

A day in the life of an Astronomer: what changes with these prompts.

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Priya is a postdoctoral astronomer studying exoplanet atmospheres.

Priya starts Thursday with a light curve that will not behave. She has a referee report due Friday and a talk to give next week. Before the course, she would spend the morning fighting code and the afternoon staring at a blank page.

She opens Claude and uses the Interpreting Observations prompt. She pastes a few points from the light curve and describes the odd dip. The AI suggests possible causes, like a blended eclipsing binary or a starspot. Priya thinks it is starspots, but the list helps her check her reasoning.

After lunch, she uses the Drafting Research Text prompt in ChatGPT. She types her rough notes about the new transit depth and asks for a clear paragraph for the paper. The draft is close, and she edits it in twenty minutes instead of three hours. Then she switches to the Peer Review and Revisions prompt to outline her referee response. The AI turns her bullet points into a polite, point-by-point reply.

By four o'clock, Priya has a draft response, a revised paragraph, and a clearer idea about the light curve. She uses the time won back to walk by the river and call her sister. The work is still hers, but the day feels lighter.

Before

  • Staring at a blank page for hours.
  • Debugging code that should work.
  • Referee reports that feel like a wall.
  • Telescope proposals written in a rush.

After this course

  • Drafting a paper section before lunch.
  • Reading plots with a second pair of eyes.
  • Referee replies that write themselves.
  • Time for a walk and a call home.

What you'll learn

  • Draft research text: Turn rough results and notes into clear, submission-ready paragraphs.
  • Explain astronomy clearly: Make complex ideas clear for students, the public, and yourself.
  • Code and analyze: Get help writing, debugging, and understanding your analysis code.
  • Interpret observations: Reason about what spectra, light curves, and images are telling you.
  • Write proposals: Build a stronger science case and justify feasibility for telescope time.
  • Calibrate and troubleshoot: Plan calibrations and diagnose instrument artifacts from plots and descriptions.
  • Model and simulate: Set up and sanity-check stellar evolution and cosmic simulation work.
  • Review and share: Write structured peer reviews, confident referee responses, and prepare talks and admin.

How this course works

  1. 9 lessonsOne task of your job each, from drafting research text to talks, conferences, and admin.
  2. Ready-to-paste promptsCopy, fill in the parts in {{brackets}}, paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
  3. Tick and completeTick the prompts you tried and mark each lesson complete.
  4. Get certifiedFinish and keep the prompts as your own library.