I was always interested in science even in elementary school. Science just seemed more mysterious and exciting to me than, say, english or geography. By junior high school, during the time of the moon landing, I began to wonder a lot about astronomy. My girlfriend and I would use her telescope and, from Queens in New York city, try to look at the moon, stars and planets. I read Asimov's books on space and, in particular, Robert Jastrow's "Red Giants and White Dwarfs" really got me excited about the evolution of stars. My girlfriend and I spent a lot of time wondering about life on other worlds. I soon became convinced that if there were answers to such questions as 'What is the origin and purpose of life?' and 'Where did the universe come from?' that I should be able to find them by studying astronomy.
By the time I had entered graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison , I had really become hooked on astronomy. It was a totally different experience than my undergraduate one because although I was only taking 3 courses, they were very advanced, covered more depth, and were nothing like the undergraduate classroom experience. I really didn't feel prepared to work in astronomy because all my training had been in physics, and astronomers use a special kind of jargon. With the exception of a brief job at the Space Astronomy Lab working on Pioneer 10 data my senior year at the State University of New York at Albany, I really didn't know what research in astronomy was all about.
I think that the most amazing thing about my work is that, just by studying the light from distant stars and galaxies, we can figure out what they are made of, how massive they are and lots of other incredible things too. I haven't lost my sense of wonderment whenever I look at the night sky, because I now understand much better how everything fits together and how it works, in amazing detail. But at the same time, all you have to do is look a bit more closely and a whole new world of detail emerges. Astronomers have been studying Jupiter for centuries but the Voyager spacecraft could still show us things we had never suspected about that planet. I think that some of the 'gee wiz' has gone out of what I do on a daily basis, but it never ceases to amaze me how just by asking the right kinds of questions, questions that seem to come naturally to me as a scientist, I can help make major discoveries in understanding our physical world.