The pessimism of my impending loss of full-time work as a research astronomer, which oozes from my last essay Towards an Uncertain Future was, thankfully, short lived. Hughes hired me on February 26, 1996 and I still had support from my 5-year, NASA research grant with Kashlinsky and Mather to see me through at least another 6 months for this fiscal year. It was a turbulent time in my life as my research became interlaced with many 'odd jobs' that Hughes found to keep me working a full 40-hours a week. But the, in March, something wonderful happened.
For years I had had an active, private project of public education. I had written numerous articles for Astronomy magazine, taught various adult education programs, authored the Astronomy Cafe web site. and done several planetarium shows, so it was with some delight that I discovered that Hughes had an 'Education Council'. I attended the March meeting and met William Taylor. He was a co-Investigator for the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Auroral Global Exploration (IMAGE) satellite, which had just been funded by NASA. He made it known that he was looking for someone to help him create the education and public outreach program for this mission, and I had a long talk with him afterwards.
I was hired on the spot!
Now, it was by pure happenstance that I had decided to attend that meeting. But had I not, I would have probably missed the boat completely because Taylor was in some hurry to appoint someone to that position. I would never have heard about this mission through my normal channels because it is a space physics mission, not astronomy. But there I was, hired to work up to full-time to do...education and public outreach! I had managed to acquire the right skills and talents. My work on the World Wide Web with the Astronomy Cafe was especially impressive to the IMAGE mission; and I had done it all on my own time. By hiring me, IMAGE had managed to find a very rare bird in professional astronomy. I was someone who had already established himself as having a reputation for just the sorts of things that a NASA mission badly needs to make itself a major presence in this non-scientific area. By a major stroke of luck, Hughes had hired me for other reasons, and now I had found a new job within the same company to manage their contract with IMAGE to provide education and public outreach support.
During the first year, I built a first draft of the IMAGE Education web site, and convened a workshop at Goddard to get teachers together to help us figure out what we should be doing with such a mission to help them educate students. This was a harder experience than I had imagined it would be. Teachers are so busy, that they seldom have any time to try new things. In my ignorance, I had assumed that all I needed to do was announce to teachers on Listserves that IMAGE was looking to find a few consultants, and I would have hundreds of teachers eager to sign on. In fact, I got NO replies at all for the first year. By 1998 I had found Ms. Susan Higley at the Elkton Middle School in Elkton Maryland. She turned out to be a real live wire, and during the summer of 1998 we created a product called 'Solar Storms and You!' which covered solar activity from A to Z in a series of classroom activities and exercises. It became an instant smash at NASA because there was nothing like it that NASA could offer teachers that covered both the science and the math curriculum. Mr. Tom Smith at the Briggs-Cheney Middle School in Silver Springs Maryland worked with us that summer and in 1999 to create a video for middle school students called 'Blackout!' which showed the effects of solar storms causing electrical problems and satellite outages. That video won several animation awards in 1999. Also in the summer of 1999, I hired Ms. Annie DiMarco, an elementary school teacher at the Holy Redeemer School in Kensington, Maryland to help us put together a classroom guide for K-6 students. During the summer of 2000, we will all get back together again to develop more fun things for the IMAGE mission and teachers. Meanwhile, visit the IMAGE/POETRY web site to keep up with what we are doing and what the mission is discovering!
In 1997, another education opportunity surfaced at NASA. I was invited to join the Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum; a new organization created by NASA Headquarters to connect teachers with missions that explore the interaction between the Sun and the Earth. For about one day a week, I would join a small group of educators and scientists to reorganize how NASA connects its vast scientific resources with teachers. I am specifically involved with writing the material and designing the official SECEF web site, and work with product and program development to create new resources to place in the hands of teachers. This isn't simply empty management duties. I have to get down and dirty creating new products for teachers, which NASA then distributes by the 10s of thousands at many national conventions such as the National Science Teachers Conventions, National Council of Mathematics Teachers, and many others. In addition to distributing products that I create with the IMAGE mission, I have the opportunity to help NASA itself by creating resource guides to help them cover even broader topics in Sun-Earth science. There are some wonderful people I have met through SECEF such as Isabel Hawkins, Jim Thieman, Karen Meyers and Diane Kisitch...and we all work together to do what we can to help teachers teach!
As the years went by, IMAGE/POETRY matured and its resources have now become major items for NASA. I attend two national conferences each year and distribute thousands of copies of our products to teachers. I also give workshops for 100-200 teachers at a time to help them figure out how to use what we have produced in their classrooms. I spend about 80% of my time doing 'education' and I still get 20% (1 day a week) to continue my research work on the Cosmic Infrared Background...the best of all possible worlds. And what continues to be amazing to me is that I have now found a way to make education a full-fledged part of my 'day-job'. This is quite a change from all the sneaking around I had to do in the 1980's and most of the 1990's to do my own thing in this area. And the results have been more than I could ever have hoped for. But as you can tell, finding a way to combine education with my research hasn't been easy. A big part of this is that I never found an opportunity to get a tenured faculty position with a college or university. This is the traditional way that astronomers do education. However, now that I am working with and for NASA, I have more opportunities to affect K-12 education that I ever would have had as a faculty member!
During the 1996-2000 period, I wrote my third, major article for Sky and Telescope magazine:
Solar Storms: The hidden menace (April, 2000)
I also wrote two major articles for the Washington Post newspaper:
The first of these articles for Horizon, got quite a lot of attention from the general public, and I was inundated with over 50 carefully-written emails from arm-chair cosmologists in the week following its publication. As for the second article, I got quite a lot of appreciative comments from the NASA community who thought it was a fabulous and well-written article. Sadly, in less than a year after that article came out, the Washington Post canciled its Horizon section on science which came out once a month. There would be no future opportunities for me to write for this news paper.
One of my most prized accomplishments during this decade was that I wrote two books 'The Astronomy Cafe' published by W.H. Freeman in May 1998, and a second book 'The 23rd Cycle' published by University of Columbia Press in December 2000. I have a third book on the way, which will tentatively be called 'In Search of Nothingness'. I can't tell you what this new book manuscript is about because I am still negotiating the contract for it.
Book publishing is one of the hardest things I have ever done. It has been very easy for me to get articles published in Sky and Telescope, Astronomy and even major newspapers such as the Washington Post...but my first book, the Astronomy Cafe, is the product of over 10 years of hard work in trying to find publishers. I have had two false starts with two other unsuccessful manuscripts...astoundingly, they both got me book contracts and advances for their manuscripts, but for various complex reasons, the publishers decided not to go forward with publishing these finished manuscripts. My luck changed completely with The Astronomy Cafe book which was the direct result of my successful, and award winning, web site by the same name. I peddled the manuscript around to over 10 publishers and agents between 1995-1997 before I met an editor who saw this as a diamond in the rough and got me to sign a contract for the book. The book has done phenomenally well, and has gotten many excellent reviews for its fresh approach to astronomy education. It is now in its second printing, and is being translated into Japanese for a year-2000 edition soon to hit the bookshelves...at least in Tokyo!
The '23rd Cycle' book is about how we have learned to live with a stormy star. It covers the A to Z of solar storms, satellite and power outages, and why we have to invest more in space weather forecasting to safeguard our technological infrastructure. This was a book that literally wrote itself, and it took me about 3 months to write the whole thing thanks to a huge database of resource materials I had gathered over the years. It's an exciting story that I really got lost in, and frustrated about. It is one of the most practical and important aspects of astronomy that actually makes direct physical contact with us on a daily basis, but one that is hardly mentioned. The public knows about sunspots and aurora, but the grand pageant of episodes of power outages, satellite failures and even human health risks is virtually unknown territory for most of us.
During my post-COBE years, there are a bunch of other fun things that have happened too: NASA/Goddard gave me an award last year (1999) for 'Excellence in Outreach' in one of those formal award ceremonies...my first professional award ever! I have even been nominated for the 2000 Popular Writing Award by the American Astronomical Association's Solar Physics Division:
" Popular Writing Awards to be awarded to authors of popular or semi-popular articles on the Sun or its effects on the Earth's environment. The purpose of these awards is to encourage scientists, science writers, and journalists to write about the Sun and thereby educate the public about results from contemporary solar research. "
I was nominated for the Popular Writing Award as a scientist primarily for my Washington Post article on solar storms. By the way, my favorite journalist for space subjects, Kathy Sawyer, was nominated for this award for a journalist covering a sun-related topic in her 'front-page' Washington Post coverage of Dr. Dick Canfield's discovery of how to predict when solar storms will happen using data from the SOHO satellite. She and I had our articles in the SAME issue (March 10, 1999) of the Washington Post, and many people at NASA and in the solar physics community were elated over the double coverage! Cross your fingers. I should know by June 2000 whether I will be getting the award or not!
As the 21st Century opens, I have more than I can do with my IMAGE and SECEF activities to keep me more than full-time occupied in some very exciting education work. The IMAGE satellite launched successfully on March 25, 2000, and by June 2000 it will be fully operational and returning data. I have been conducting live web chats with the NASA Quest program on most Thursdays at 2PM EST during the school year as part of their Space Scientist Online program. My teacher consultants will regroup this summer at Goddard, and together we will create a whole new round of classroom activities and curriculum materials for students, as they learn about space. We will also join a number of SECEF folks for weekly volleyball games outside Building 26 at Goddard...a summer ritual. I think that my recent efforts in helping the K-12 community are making a little difference. There are over 10,000 teachers across the country who I have personally handed out our materials to in workshops and national conventions. They all seemed very excited about getting this fresh new material to use.
Beyond the end of the IMAGE mission in 2002, and at an estimated age of 49, I no longer expect to worry too much about whether I will be employed or not. Now that I have, at long last, reached some level of notoriety and respect for what I do at NASA, it should be less traumatic to find new openings in education-related programs. That last comment about 'notoriety' sounds a bit egotistical, but lets face it...if no one knows who you are in the area in which you are trying to succeed, you will always find yourself passed over for new opportunities. Its not 'egotism' its purely a matter of survival in a very competitive world. I do not plan to get left behind, especially since NASA has begun its 10-year, $500 million Living with a Star program. This will imply more funds for education-related activities like the ones I am already involved with at least until the year 2010 or so. I am hoping that my new book 'The 23rd Cycle' will be a tool for NASA to promote the seriousness of this program, and I am happy to lend a hand in this effort...and perhaps reap a few professional benefits from it too!
As for my research work, that remains a very dicey game at best. Following 5 years of work, we have made a major discovery. It is not often in a career that you can state that you made a major discovery, and most astronomers never do reach this kind of goal. We used the infrared data from the COBE satellite to extract from it the unmistakable signal of the Cosmic Infrared Background. This has been the Holy Grail of infrared astronomy or over two decades...and we found it! Our paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal on January 1, 2000, and we were very excited about it. But, my experience with the Cosmic Infrared Background research left a very bad taste in my mouth about the darker side of my profession. I no longer have the same optimism and enthusiasm about my research as I did in the 1980s when I was my own boss, and working in less competitive areas of research. But this change of heart is a whole other story which I plan to tell soon in the next chapter of this Guide to Astronomy!