Heritage
Spotlight: Science Advocate
C.R.
O'Dell
Bob
O'Dell has been a long time friend and
collaborator of the Hubble Heritage Project. An
avid Hubble observer, Bob's main astronomical interest
is nebulae, one of the more photogenic treasures
in deep space. Bob has been a science advocate for
our team on many Heritage observations and the Hubble
archive is studed his science work.
Other
Heritage/O'Dell Image Releases
Biography
of Bob O'Dell
"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), although I've been working on Planetary
Nebulae for almost as long. 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." |
