|
"My first remembered interest in astronomy was
when my sixth grade teacher asked us all to write
a one page paper on "What I want to be doing in
25 years" and I wrote that I wanted to be an astronomer
observing with the 200-inch telescope at Palomar
Observatory. How did I come up with this? It
must have been "My Weekly Reader" a newspaper for
kids, which was giving a lot of attention to the
Palomar giant since it was just getting into operation
then. I pushed my folks to buy me a set of optics
for a small telescope when in the seventh grade
and used these to build my first telescope and the
Orion Nebula was one of the first objects I looked
at.
My interest in astronomy was sustained by reading
the monthly Sky
& Telescope Magazine from cover to
cover and building several additional telescopes,
starting from scratch (actually blank pieces of
glass and lots of grinding compound). Being a professional
anything didn't seem realistic for a kid from a
family where the parents had a total of 14 years
of gradeschool education, but they encouraged me
to go to a state teachers college and to take it
from there. At Illinois
State (then Illinois State Normal University)
I studied physics and chemistry. Fortunately, Sputnik
was launched in the autumn of my Junior year and
the USA discovered that it had been neglecting the
space related sciences. This was a chance not to
be missed and I was lucky enough to be admitted
into the newly revamped astronomy department of
the University of
Wisconsin. I emerged from there with a fresh
Ph.D. three years later, headed to CalTech
as a post-doc, then went on to Berkeley
as an assistant professor. I bounced to the Yerkes
Observatory of the University of Chicago two
years later and rose up through the professorial
ranks, being chair of the department and then director
of Yerkes for five years.
I left Yerkes for Huntsville, Alabama in 1972
to become NASA's Project Scientist for (what is
now called) the Hubble Space Telescope. This was
before the HST was an approved program, so that
the early years were spent in selling the idea to
Congress, to the astronomical community (many of
whom were skeptical), and coming up with a preliminary
design. After 1977 we were in the construction phase
of HST and I left NASA in 1982 to return to research,
becoming a professor at Rice
University in Houston. I have recently joined
the Physics and Astronomy staff at Vanderbilt
University as a Distinguished Research Scientist.
That childhood look at Orion must have really
influenced me because I've worked on the Orion Nebula
region on and off for the bulk of my professional
life (now 40+ years). It is still a case that many
mornings I can't wait to get in to the office to
find out what lies around the next corner." |
