An early interest in astronomy led Aikman to join the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada Quebec Centre in 1958, at the age of 15.
[10] This revealed what is perhaps the youngest high-mass stellar object in the Galaxy, namely W3(OH), a cocoon star [11] invisible at optical wavelengths but surrounded by a rapidly expanding ultracompact HII region,[12] all within a dense obscuring dust shell.
[13] His initial research was on the spectroscopy of comets, and of chemically peculiar stars whose surface compositions differ markedly from that of the Sun, with the aim of understanding the origin of their anomalies.
This led to the discovery of a chemically peculiar star, HR 7775, having extraordinary enhancements of the element gold in its atmosphere.
From 1991, he conducted a program of tracking Earth approaching asteroids with the historic telescope built by John S. Plaskett, but the project was cancelled in 1997.