Well...If I were to describe it, I would have to say that it is strictly determined by what I find interesting at the moment. In a way, I have been professionally driven to this style because I have never had the luxury of being employed in recent years for longer than a few years with any one company. being a 'contract' astronomer means that you are doing work for someone elses research, not necessarily your own research. If you want to do your own work, you have to explicitly get a grant to do it and that's very very hard to do. So, you stop worrying about 5-year and 10-year grand projects you want to pursue, and concentrate on simpler projects that take less than a year to complete. At least this is MY situation. If you asked other astronomers, you would get a wide range of research styles.
My research is driven by my own personal curiosity, often in areas that are not very well traveled, or perhaps even significant in the grand scheme of things. To some, this is a fatal professional mistake since they argue that to survive, you constantly have to be out there at the cutting edge of research doing the 'big' 'important' projects. My own curiosity often takes me into the research library to read-up on what is known about some particular issue that caught my attention. Often I discover that the subject is already well understood, and I then spend a few hours getting 'culturally enriched' reading up on what the conclusion is, and whether it satisfies me or not.
I spent 10 years studying star forming regions in the dark clouds of Cygnus, and this pretty well did me in for that subject. I am now restless to poke into other areas of astronomy. I recently let my curiosity about the nature of the physical vacuum take me on a 3 year tour of the technical and historical literature. I wrote a book on what I had encountered and it is being published by the University of Chicago Press next year. It is called 'The Accidental Vacuum'. Researching the literature and thinking about this subject was one of the MOST exciting things I had done in the last 10 years!!! It will not, however, gain me any professional recognition in astronomy, but sometimes you have to stand up for the things that give you pleasure and excite your mind. I am still well-published in astronomy, and have recently been collaborating with some colleagues on a study of the cosmic infrared background. This has been exciting, but again it was basically someone else's research that I was invited to contribute to. Nothing beats being the master of your own work, as any independent businessman would attest to.
So, if I were to describe my style, it would be curiosity-driven and off the beaten track. How do I 'think' that make this all happen? I regularly read the weekly science and astronomy journals. I read popular astronomy magazines, and I am constantly on the lookout for that 'aha' feeling that says to me " Hmmm, there's an interesting topic I have not thought about in a long time!" . I then mull over what I know about it and whether I could explain it in writing to the general audience of a popular science magazine. If I can convince myself that it stimulates me and the average readership of a science magazine, then I start exploring what is known about the topic by doing a literature search in the technical journals. This could either end up in my writing a popular article, or actually considering a technical contribution to the subject on my own.
Sometimes I just find myself excited by the thrill of the hunt. When I am presented with a collection of data, my first question is usually 'What is it?'. I enjoy rummaging through catalogs to identify new objects detected at other wavelengths. I also get part of the same feeling when I log onto my mail service for this Internet site and read the new questions that have come in by people like you. I do not know why this is so, but I really enjoy answering questions and sometimes having to do a little background research to come up with answers to these questions. I really spent some time with a recent question about whether aurorae are seen in the north and south poles at the same time. This took several days, part time, combing through dozens of books and research articles before I stumbled upon a one or two sentence answer. It was like an Easter Egg hunt, and I REALLY like those!