The only objective way to assess how the paper was received by the astronomical community is to do a citation study on it after a few years. Believe it or not, there is a company in New Jersey that goes through the bibliographies of articles in all the major scientific journals every 6 months and counts up how many times an article is cited. So, I went to the main library at the Goddard Space Flight Center and got the 1988 - 1994 volumes of the 'Science Citation Index' and looked under my name for this article, listed as ApJ v.325 p.320. And for each year counted up the number of papers that cited mine. Here's the table of the number of cites per year:
1988............1 cite
1989............3 cites
1990............4 cites
1991............3 cites
1992............5 cites
1993............0 cites
1994............4 cites
1995............0 cites
1996............1 cite
1997............4 cites
1998............0 cites
1999............2 cites
The first time I was cited was in 1988 by Virginia Trimble who wrote an article for Nature ( v.336, p. 111) about a peculiar population of young massive stars in the halo of the Milky Way, and possible reasons for how they got there. My article was cited by her as an example of a study that suggested they may have been born there via star formation in low mass molecular clouds.
Of course, I would have preferred many more citations of my article, but some papers you write are like this. I have looked at papers by other astronomers and it is not uncommon to find some that only get cited a total of 1 or 2 times over their first five years.
Maybe the next paper I write will not only be an exciting one for me, but will also gain the attention of more people over a longer period of time. My first paper on "A Far-Infrared Survey of the Galactic Center" has, over the years since 1982 been a much more frequently cited paper for which I am eternally happy!!
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