I have to process an assload of data points for a couple of star fields, and it's quite tiresome. It doesn't help that my advisor doesn't even know which of the stars is the target in the first place...
Why doesn't he know that?!
Because he's never actually looked at the star field before. Also, there is the fact that the stars that we are trying to identify are higher than 14th magnitude, and are much more visible in the X-ray spectrum than in the visible light one.
Basically, the reason I'm doing this project in the first place is because the university I'm at just got a new telescope, and my advisor just basically went "Oh cool! Now lets use it to study some obscure star that I don't even know about!". Personally, I think he's doing this just so he can fill a quota on published papers ...