This morning, exactly ten tramillion astronomers streamed from their hotel rooms into the first scientific talk of the day, which was the release of the first results from the Kepler mission.  The 5 plantes that were announced at the talk stimulated not only the scientific curiosity of the delegates, but also created a tremendous hunger for danishes, as seen from the crumb-covered Marabunta-decimated coffe break tables right after the talk.  On this basis alone, I think the Kepler discoveries can be declared a success.

The Kepler talk started as almost all scientific talks, do, with giving some basic background on the subject before getting to the results.  A primer on the spacecraft and extrasolar planets covered a few slides, the basics of transits were covered in another few (Kepler looks for the dimming of stars as the planet passes in front of the star), as the excitement in the silent room slowly built.  But everyone in the room was patiently waiting for the meat and potatoes – what new members could we add to the planetary family?

When the results were finally announced, the excitement had created a vibe in the room that made me think that the delegates were almost ready to applaud right then and there. In just a few months, Kepler found and confirmed 5 new extrasolar planets: 1 Neptune-sized and 4 planets larger than Jupiter, all gas giants.  The largest planet has a density of Styrofoam. Welcome to the fold, Planet Beer Cooler.

Of course, this is just the tip of the galactic iceberg.  Kepler is focused on finding earth-sized planets over its three-year mission, and it won’t be too long before we hopefully start confirming tiny rocky bodies similar to ours orbiting around distant suns.  It will keep staring at the same spot in the sky, measuring the brightness variations in the same stars, giving us a wealth of information about how common earth-like, and not-so-earth like planets are in our galaxy. How unique are we?  Exactly how nifty are digital watches in the Universe?

But if this excitement is going to continue for years to come, the American people should prepare for a danish brown-out across this great country.

I’m here at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC, which is poised to pop open like a scientific pinata starting Monday!  With over 2500 registrants, the AAS has billed this as “the largest meeting in astronomy history.”  The meeting is stuffed chock full of amazing astronomical announcements, many of which you’ll see making daily headlines all this week.  Check out the meeting’s long list of abstracts and topics. It’s going to be an especially great conference for exoplanets.  Tons of individual talks and posters  on everything from exoplanet atmospheres to the hunting of exo-moons.

I’ll be presenting my own poster on Tuesday on the research I’m doing with NOAO on searching for stars that have possibly “eaten” their planets (if you happen to be here, wander over to 423.12. Searching for Planetary Pollution: Stellar Parameters for 10 Stars with Planets. I’ll try and post a copy of the poster soon.Since I plan on concentrating in extrasolar planet and Kuiper belt research in grad school next year, I’m really looking forward to meeting and talking with the astronomers who are doing the cutting-edge research in the field.

But one big presser everyone’s waiting for is tomorrow’s big announcement from the Kepler mission about their first results.  Kepler’s new website was revealed just a few days ago, and it curiously now includes a “Kepler Planet Counter” on the side of the page.  It’s at 0 planets now, but that won’t last long!

Stay tuned – I’ll try and keep this space updated with all the cool stuff coming out of the hot Universe.

P.S.

Oh, and speaking of exoplanets and Kepler, check out Michael Koppleman and Mike Simonsen’s 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast “Kepler and Extrasolar Asteroids” with Kepler scientist (and Pittsburgh-area native) Dr. Steve Howell, whom I had a great time working with at NOAO last summer.

Dennis Brutus, who was jailed in the 1960s with Nelson Mandela, instrumental in South Africa’s suspension from the Olympics, and called Africa’s most important poet, died yesterday at the age of 85.  He was a Professor of Poetry and Black Studies at Pitt and Northwestern for some years, before returning to South Africa after Apartheid ended.  From the AP:

Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Brutus was the son of South African teachers who moved back to their native country when he was still a boy. He majored in English at Fort Hare University, which he attended on full scholarship, and taught at several South African high schools.

By his early 20s, he was politically involved and helped create the South African Sports Association, formed in protest against the official white sports association. Arrested in 1963, Brutus fled the country when released on bail, but was captured and nearly killed when shot as he attempted to escape police custody inJohannesburg and forced to wait for an ambulance that would accept blacks. Brutus was sentenced to 18 months at Robben Island.

His books “Sirens, Knuckles, Boots” and “Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison” were published while he was in jail. He was confined, but unbeaten, writing in the poem “Somehow We Survive” that “All our land is scarred with terror/rendered unlovely and unlovable/sundered are we and all our passionate surrender/but somehow tenderness survives.” In “Prayer,” written after he left prison, he proclaims, “Uphold — frustrate me if need be/so that I mould my energy/for that one swift inerrable soar.”

Brutus was a rare man and aritst, engaging the world in issues of political justice with relentless energy, while filling it with the beauty of his poetry (here’s a list of his works available on Amazon).  In his later years, he championed climate change issues, and as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports, even wrote newspaper editorials about the recent Copenhagen international environmental conference, which he had hoped to attend, but could not due to his failing health.

Here is Brutus reciting his poem Gull:

With the passing of Brutus, the world has lost a powerful force for political and environmental peace.  Before the global warming crisis became a pressing international concern, he had united the ideas of preserving nature’s balance and establishing political justice. In one of his last poems, delivered at an environmental conference in Venezuela just a few months ago, he described a future where a celestial symbol of hope unites the earth in peace and freedom.  When that star finally arrives, I can’t help think that Brutus will be a big reason it shines.

There will come a time we believe
When the shape of the planet
and the divisions of the land
Will be less important;
We will be caught in a glow of friendship
a red star of hope
will illuminate our lives
A star of hope
A star of joy
A star of freedom

- Dennis Brutus October 18, 2008, Caracas, Venezuela.

I missed this bit of science news when it was released: Top scientists (from Zissou Labs?) created a powerful new microscope, and released never-before-seen images of chemical reactions.  We’re finally able to resolve individual atoms and molecules into their constituent hairy-faced quarks.

Cassini Image of Saturn in Near Infrared. The elongated shadow of Tethys drapes across the planet's clouds. Click to embiggen.

Dr. Carolyn Porco, chief image scientist for the Cassini mission at Saturn, twittered this striking image a few weeks back, and I had to share it.  The giant ringed world, slumbering in the darkness a billion miles away, has been hosting our tiny emissary for over five years.  Buzzing around Saturn like a gnat around an elephant, Cassini has relayed back a glimpse at the glorious sights of this miniature solar system.  This image is of light that we can’t normally see – near infrared light – which planetary scientists use to track the presence of methane throughout Saturn’s atmosphere.

186 Years before Cassini’s arrival, poet John Keats began his epic poem Hyperion about the God Saturn’s overthrow by the plots of Jupiter.  Keats describes a sleeping Saturn, sitting in the cold darkness, seemingly unable to be stirred to action.  This Cassini image reminded me how cold and dark it truly is out there among the Gods of the outer solar system.  Sunlight power is vastly diminished out there, as seen from the quiet cloud activity compared to its mythological rival Jupiter, who lies twice as close to the sun.   Forged over billions of years, isolated by millions of kilometers, Saturn has no one but the whispers of his tiny moons to wake him from his cosmic slumber.  Even Keats decided to abandon Saturn, stopping work on his poem after only a few months. Cassini is the first new voice in eons, documenting the Old God on his ancient throne.

Deep in the shady sadness of a Vale,
Far sunken from the healthy breath of Morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and Eve’s one star,
Sat grey hair’d Saturn quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his Lair.
Forest on forest hung above his head,
Like Cloud on Cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer’s day
Robs not at all the dandelion’s fleece:
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad mid her reeds
Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.

Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had stray’d,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bow’d head seem’d list’ning to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.

It seem’d no force could wake him from his place;
But there came one, who with a kindred hand
Touch’d his wide shoulders, after bending low
With reverence, though to one who knew it not.
She was a Goddess of the infant world;
By her in stature the tall Amazon
Had stood a pigmy’s height: she would have ta’en
Achilles by the hair and bent his neck;
Or with a finger stay’d Ixion’s wheel.
Her face was large as that of Memphian sphinx,
Pedestal’d haply in a palace court,
When sages look’d to Egypt for their lore.
But oh! how unlike marble was that face:
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
There was a listening fear in her regard,
As if calamity had but begun;
As if the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
One hand she press’d upon that aching spot
Where beats the human heart, as if just there,
Though an immortal, she felt cruel pain:
The other upon Saturn’s bended neck
She laid, and to the level of his ear
Leaning with parted lips, some words she spake
In solemn tenour and deep organ tone:
Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue
Would come in these like accents; O how frail
To that large utterance of the early Gods!
“Saturn, look up!—though wherefore, poor old King?
“I have no comfort for thee, no not one:
“I cannot say, “O wherefore sleepest thou?’
“For heaven is parted from thee, and the earth
“Knows thee not, thus afflicted, for a God;
“And ocean too, with all its solemn noise,
“Has from thy sceptre pass’d; and all the air
“Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
“Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
“Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house;
“And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
“Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
“O aching time! O moments big as years!
“All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
“And press it so upon our weary griefs
“That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
“Saturn, sleep on:—O thoughtless, why did I
“Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
“Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?
“Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep.”

- John Keats, Hyperion, Book 1

P.S. Don’t miss Carolyn Porco’s TED Talk as she flies you around Saturn.

Explaining the Universe one crazy particle at at time.

and Real Science! A recent interview with Al Gore on his new book:

It’s Black Friday, the annual tradition where families of vampires awake before dawn and then shuffle in zombie-like shambling hoards through the parking lots to the gates of hell.  Or at least Macy’s.  Hey, that actually sounds like fun when put like that!

But this holiday season, I’d like to recommend one gift that doesn’t involve a 45 minute wait at Denny’s:  Paul Halpern’s book Collider! (Check out Paul’s excellent blog as well).  With the Large Hadron Collider starting up again this week, this is a perfect time to gift someone the story surrounding the exciting search for the fundamental building blocks of the Universe. With Collider, Paul tells a tale with a colorful cast of characters who are sometimes engaged in intense rivalries.  Set against the backdrop of two world wars and a pretty big cold one, these seemingly obsessed scientists and engineers create high-powered hardware so potent, some people fear that it might break the world. Is it too late to buy an extended warranty for the Earth?

The Large Hadron Collider, set to make some major discoveries about the basic building blocks of matter, is the gleaming culmination of almost 100 years of particle collider experiments. Eighty years before the $4.5 billion, 27-kilometer long high powered collider is set to find the exotic and elusive Higgs Boson, an obscure Norwegian engineer by the name of Rolf Wideröe began the collider era with an unassuming prototype just one meter long.  He accelerated sodium and potassium ions into a stationary target, and used photographic plates to record the resulting particle explosions.

Wideröe’s working model inspired a team led by atomic heavyweight Ernest Rutherford in England, who previously discovered the atomic nucleus, which led to his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.  Rutherford was known for his relentless drive, booming voice, and red-faced temper tantrums.  Collider does a wonderful job illustrating Rutherford’s abrasive style and his ability to produce results through a combination of recruiting top physics students and his own insights into atomic theory. Under Rutherford’s direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton eventually morphed the Wideröe model into the world’s first “atom smasher”, which split the Lithium atom in 1932.

Much like the cascade of subatomic particles that colliders create, Paul guides us through the cascade of scientific personalities who would later become giants of physics through the study of the very small.  Ernest Lawrence anchored the American entry into atom smasher business, developing the circular cyclotron accelerator, which earned him the 1939 Nobel Prize in Physics. Lawrence then spearheaded  war-time nuclear research in his famous Radiation Lab at Berkeley.

Lawrence begat physicist Robert Wilson, if you can consider firing Wilson twice from his laboratory “begatting.”  Undeterred, Wilson would become one of the most famous physicists in the world by heading up the creation of the then-colossal 4 mile-long collider later named Fermilab.  In addition to bringing it under budget and on time (could it be the last government project to do that?), Wilson personally designed Fermilab’s futuristic buildings to be in harmony with its natural surroundings in the rural fields of Illinois.  This included dirt floors in some of the laboratory buildings, and grazing bison on the grounds to remind everyone of the pioneering work that they were doing there.

Accelerators evolved to higher energies, probing ever deeper into the subatomic abyss, like the California’s Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1962. Collider illuminates how these historical foundations formed the two large forces in nuclear accelerators: the American labs on one side of the Atlantic and the European consortium CERN on the other.  The Texas-based Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled in 1993 due to skyrocketing budgets, which at three times the power of the LHC, could have found the Higgs Boson over ten years ago.  This led the way for CERN to build the cheaper but nonetheless impressive LHC in an already existing tunnel.  With this, Paul brings us back again full circle to the present day wonder of modern science that is the LHC, humming deep under the green hills and quaint villages of France and Switzerland.

From http://qrczaq.blogspot.com/

Collider explains in easy to understand language about the accusations and concerns among some that the LHC’s power will create some bizarre unforseen catastrophe – from creating microscopic black holes which would swallow the earth, to the creation of giant magnetic monopoles that would give us all a permanent orange afro.  From the books’ introduction,

One team of activists, led by former nuclear safety official Walter Wagner, has gone so far as to sue to LHC, pressing for a halt to its operations.  In response to public concerns about the LHC’s purported dangers, researchers working on the project have issued detailed analyses of potential threats to the planet, demonstrating how none of these are worth fretting about.

I have exclusive videotape of those tests:

Paul does a great job of explaining why the LHC won’t destroy us all using easy to understand terms without dumbing down the physics behind it. It’s so much more in depth than we’re used to getting from a 60 second TV news report or even a short newspaper article. I usually don’t give away the ending to books, but maybe I’ll make an exception here: we’re all going to be OK!

And that’s an overall trait that I really enjoyed about Collider.  Paul does not shy away from explaining the physics driving the quest for these tiny particles in a very easy to understand language and metaphors that makes popular science books great.  During the journey, you’ll learn tons about atomic and subatomic physics, cosmology, the four fundamental forces of nature, quantum mechanics, string theory, multiple dimensions, dark energy and so much more.  By the end of the book, you’ll know your MACHOs from your WIMPs.

Collider is a great resource that not only gives you the details about the LHC and what its looking for firsthand from a physicist, but the necessary history and human motivations to appreciate it even more. The LHC has captured the imagination of the public in a way the other gigantic science project of the times hasn’t, the International Space Station.  The LHC has resurrected the images of giant Tesla coils, Jacob’s Ladders, Van de Graaf generators and wild-eyed scientists from the yellowed celluloid of science fiction films, and placed them at the heart of our imaginations as something new and mysterious.  Collider is your gateway to the New Mad Science.

If you didn’t catch the release earlier this week, the groovy folks at Symphony of Science have released a new video.  This one features Carl Sagan, Robert Jastrow, Michio Kaku and some Richard Dawkinsy goodness.

Now I know you want to get your galactic groove on to the rest of the videos. Man, the song from the first one just sticks in your head and doesn’t let go.

You can also order “A Glorious Dawn” on 7″ vinyl, which has a B-side that’s out of this world:

Third Man Records, in conjunction with United Record Pressing, fabricated a special “Cosmos Colored Vinyl” of which 150 copies will be available…50 randomly inserted into mail orders for “A Glorious Dawn” and the remainder to be made available at the Third Man Records Nashville store front at noon on November 9th.

The one-sided single features a very special etching on the flipside. Reproduced from the original artwork, the etching copies the etching included with the Voyager Golden Record, set off into space in 1977 as the most elaborate message-in-a-bottle idea ever imagined.

I have a big spot in my heart for the Symphony of Science creations – it reminds me of my planetarium days, where I actually got to  to create science music videos on a giant domed screen 60 feet across for a living.

In the 90s, I worked for a company that did the laser shows you would see in planetariums, like the Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin shows you’d go to with your friends when you probably should’ve been studying in a library somewhere.  A few weeks after Carl Sagan passed away, I was asked to create some sort of planetarium show tribute to him to a group of planetarium educators for an upcoming planetarium conference in Philadelphia.  Whoa – no pressure there!  Just somehow give a deserving tribute to the most famous astronomy educator to the collected group of my educator colleagues!

I went to work at my Pro Tools console, with a video tape collection of the entire Cosmos series to make the soundtrack.  With Sagan’s words and the then out-of-print soundtrack to Cosmos and Vangelis’ Heaven and Hell (where the main theme from the TV series came from), Carl Sagan slowly came back from beyond. Under the planetarium dome in Boston, I slaved away on laser-created imagery, and mapped out a storyboard for visuals for a digital star projector that they had there in Philly, and coordinated with the programmer there about what visuals to put where.  I didn’t know if it would all come together at the last minute when I got to Philly, and even if it worked, I didn’t know how people would react to what I created in just a few weeks.  I was trying to pay tribute to a giant in a room full of hardened astronomy educators who were very familiar  with Sagan’s work (some of whom knew him).

I got to Philly, and found out that my show was scheduled to be the last thing people saw at the conference – the grand finale – and it was to be a surprise to the delegates.  As my boss introduced my show to all assembled in the large, round theater, I sat in the planetarium and laser control console in the rear, trying to remember the complicated sequence of events to pull it all off; it was a live performance – like playing some arcane musical instrument being conducted by Sagan himself.  I only had a chance to rehearse the show once in the wee hours of the night before – it could all crash and burn at the moment, given all the different technologies hacked together.  The lights slowly faded, I hit play on the reel-to-reel audio tape, and merged the darkness into a vibrant cloud of a multiwatt violet laser nebula with the first notes of Vangelis’ piano.

laser lumia sample by http://www.lightshow.cc/

As Carl’s words merged with the powerful music in the darkness, I flew the audience through galaxies, into DNA molecules, then skimmed the surface of planets.  I was completely caught up in the performance, and everything around me seemed to fade away. After about four minutes, the starry heavens evaporated with Carl’s words, “I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”  Our own morning came in the form of theater lights.  As the spell lifted, there was silence.  I slowly glanced around at the circular room full of friends, colleagues, and current and former coworkers.

The renovated Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia

Huge applause erupted in the dome, and as my eyes adapted to the soft light, I noticed some people were crying.  It hit me how much we all missed him.  As planetarians, as astronomy educators, we had lost our champion.  We were so used to having Carl Sagan out there talking to the world as an eloquent advocate for exploration and rationalism, that it took something like this to remind us all of how irreplaceable he was.

As folks made there way around to the exit, they thanked me, and were nice enough to say very kind words about the show.  Unfortunately, I can’t post the show on youtube or DVD –   it was made in a place and time with things that can’t be recorded like giant domes and coherent photons.  The light, sound and emotion was an experience in the moment – very much like we all are in this life.

Milky Way Center Mosaic from the Great Observatories (click to embiggen)

“We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens . . . The diversity of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.”

-Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum

Thanksgiving is a tradition where we surround ourselves with family and friends and reflect on what we are thankful for.  Our health, our children, the ones we hold close are the first things that come to mind, of course.  But I can’t help but also be tremendously thankful for the times we live in.  We’re lucky enough to live in a time when the human race dines on a harvest of new revelations about the Universe around us. An almost daily banquet of new discoveries blur across my computer screen everyday, and as my eyes and mind feast on the vistas of other planets and other galaxies, I feel tempted  to take it all for granted.

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for our current golden age of scientific discovery.  This is a unique time in human history, and it should be celebrated and protected by planting the seeds of education and peace.  We should repay the hard work and sacrifice of the many scientists, inventors,  engineers and visionaries who have toiled before us, by fulfilling our dreams.  After all, our dreams are just theirs carried forward.

“Johannes Kepler believed that there would one day be ‘celestial ships with sails adapted to the winds of heaven’ navigating the sky, filled with explorers ‘who would not fear the vastness’ of space. And today those explorers, human and robot, employ as unerring guides on their voyages through the vastness of space the three laws of planetary motion that Kepler uncovered during a lifetime of personal travail and ecstatic discovery.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos

I knew Pittsburgh roads were chaotic, but... This would only be complete if it included an arrow toward Mars, a northern suburb of Pittsburgh.

While I still have to write more about the details about my summer internship in Tucson, this morning I’ll share a story I heard there about… Pittsburgh.

I spent my summer sheltered from the blazing Tucson sun in an air conditioned room filled with big glossy-screened iMacs.  I was using software called SPECTRE and MOOG to make measurements inside the spectra (the spread out light of a star), and to take those measurements and translate them into how much Iron, Oxygen, Carbon, Silicon, and other elements are in each star.  The process is very labor intensive, and it’s much like measuring the exact length of every hair on your arm.

I had a question (actually I thought I had discovered an anomaly) in the way SPECTRE added  several exposures of the light together, driving up the signal that you want, and reducing the unwanted noise in the spectra that is in every telescope exposure.  My advisor was away on a trip, so I exchanged a few emails with the author of the software, Dr. Chris Sneden, a long-time astronomy professor at the University of Texas.  He was very helpful with navigating the secrets of his code, and it wasn’t long before I had figured out a workaround for adding the spectra.

Flash forward some days later.  I was having coffee with my friend Thom, a fellow former Pittsburgher, astronomer, Northsider, Perry graduate, Buhl-ite, who was now living in Tucson – pretty much paralleling my own background, only he did it 20 years earlier than I.  Thom was in high school in the 1960s, at the height of the space race, a time when much of America was inspired at every manned space launch and was fascinated  by amazing new astronomical and technical discoveries.  Thom told me it was then that he and a few buddies about the same age started an advanced astronomy club to do their own backyard-based research.  Its members were Thom, Chris Sneden… and Jay Apt.  If that last name sounds familiar, that’s Jay Apt, space shuttle astronaut.  That’s some little astronomy club!

Dr. Chris Sneden at the University of Texas

Dr. Sneden’s biography at the University of Texas website describes the moment while growing up in Pittsburgh when he encountered the astronomy spark:

“I can remember the exact moment when I became interested in astronomy,” says astronomer Chris Sneden, professor at The University of Texas. He was at his home in Pennsylvania, listening to a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game on the radio. During the commercial break, he heard an advertisement for Saturday morning astronomy classes at the Pittsburgh planetarium. Since then, he says he “never, ever wanted to do a single thing other than astronomy. There was never a Plan B.”

Chris attributes much of his success to his parents, Harold and Alice Sneden, who encouraged him to pursue his interest in astronomy. “They knew I was so pigheaded that I wasn’t going to be stopped anyway,” says Chris. “They gave me much encouragement.”

As graduation from his small, mill-town high school loomed, Chris visited his career counselor and inquired about studying astronomy in college. “I don’t know anything about that,” his counselor said, and gave Chris a book with colleges sorted by academic major. Chris quickly turned to the astronomy section and scanned down the list. “I got to Harvard and said, ‘Ahh, I can’t get into Harvard.’ The very next college on the list was Haverford.”

Now THAT’s some ad!  I wonder if that recording exists somewhere.

Dr. Jay Apt shown to scale with the Space Shuttle

Jay Apt also credits his visits to Buhl to preparing him for a career as an astronaut who would go on to fly on four shuttle missions, including a stay on the Russian space station Mir.

During his childhood, he visited Pittsburgh’s original Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science many times. This included attendance in Buhl Science classes, including Rocketry, and participation in the annual Pittsburgh Regional School Science and Engineering Fair. Dr. Apt credits his childhood visits to Buhl Planetarium as sparking his interest to become an astronaut. In Buhl Planetarium’s 50th anniversary (1989) book titled, “Lives Touched…Worlds Changed,” Fifty Years of Alumni Achievements, Dr. Apt wrote: “Buhl classes are probably the best preparation for a technical career I can imagine.”

In 1997, Jay Apt would leave NASA to return to Pittsburgh, becoming Director of The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, which included the new Buhl Planetarium inside The Carnegie Science Center. During his time there, he guided the museums through some turbulent times, setting it on course for a successful future.  He’s now teaching and directing a technology and public policy institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Thom went on to get his astronomy degree at the University of Kansas, work in software, somehow had time for a career as a professional pianist and composer, and is now actively doing astronomical research with variable stars.

Thom’s story is a great reminder of what can happen wen you give kids community resources like good schools and public institutions like Buhl, coupled with the ambition that a youthful drive for exploring the unknown can bring.  When I met Thom, I could definitely still see the spark that was ignited over 40 years ago -  for space, for discovery, for the sciences and the arts.

The town that once had blackened out its stars with the soot of its steel mills has given rise to those who would fly to them.