Astronomy as a field has been relatively friendly to small collaborations, particularly when compared to its bigger sibling, physics. But the trend towards lar

Astronomy as a field has been relatively friendly to small collaborations, particularly when compared to its bigger sibling, physics. But the trend towards larger projects is real and can be seen in the authorship statistics [1]. But I feel that it is oversimplifying somewhat to compare big projects to little projects, as the two aren't necessarily in opposition. Oftentimes large projects are collecting data to answer a small number of important questions, but in the process of doing so produce data that is useful for individual astronomers. While those big, important questions may be useful for justifying the project to grant agencies, everyone knows that the real value is in the (unpredictable) science that the dataset inspires. SDSS is a good example of this. (In fact, my very first summer research project as an undergraduate took advantage of SDSS data.) It's true that once those driving questions have been answered the big players look for the next big, shiny project. But the data is still there and is accessible to the community. That makes it possible for an astronomer to answer interesting questions without needing to expend the telescope time and money to collect data that are already there. But not all large projects are like that. The risk is if the field moves away from large projects which are more or less glorified catalogs (e.g., SDSS, Gaia, LSST), towards large projects that don't offer much in the way of ancillary science to individual astronomers (LIGO and Planck come to mind here, but someone more knowledgable about those projects should correct me if I'm wrong). [1]: https://orbitingfrog.com/2012/08/04/authorship-in-astronomy/ https://orbitingfrog.com/2012/08/04/authorship-in-astronomy/