The committee also obtained the APS Division of Astrophysics membership list for 1998. The number of junior members also continued to increase, and this increase is consistent with the continued increase in the number of degree recipients and graduate enrollments shown in Figure 4.1 . In 1998 there were approximately 1,600 members of the APS Division of Astrophysics, of which approximately 9 percent were at foreign addresses. Thus, the combined number of U.S. AAS members and non-AAS, APS Division of Astrophysics members was approximately 6,500 in 1998. Astronomy Ph.D. production, including physics department students doing astronomical and astrophysical dissertations, continued to rise in the last three years, in contrast to Ph.D. production in physics and the physical sciences in general.
Astronomy remains arguably the most vibrant of the physical sciences in the United States.
In both cases, random samples of 600 to 700 full, U.S. members were drawn from the AAS rolls. Individuals were classified by discipline, field, and place of employment. The full lists of classification categories are given in Table A.1 in Appendix A . These same categorizations were used for the classification of publications and funding sources discussed below in Section 4.2 . The committee is aware that many individuals fall into more than one of the categorizations and that because only about 20 percent of the U.S. full AAS membership was sampled, the accuracy of the estimates for distribution by discipline and field is necessarily limited.