Dr. Jerry Bonnell received a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Maryland in 1987. He has since enjoyed working on a variety of astrophysical satellite projects at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center including the Cosmic Background Explorer, the International Ultraviolet Explorer, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and the Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). While his research interests have wandered across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, since 1992 they have focused on the time histories and spectral evolution of cosmic gamma-ray bursts.
Author of popular books, reviews, and magazine articles on astronomy and high-energy astrophysics, Dr. Bonnell is also a founding editor and author of the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). Begun in 1995, APOD remains one of the largest archives of annotated astronomy and space related images on the World Wide Web.
Dr. Bonnell lives with his wife (an art historian) and two academically excellent, athletic, and musically minded sons in Greenbelt, MD.
Jerry’s MWAIC 2008 Presentation will be:
APOD on the World Wide Web
After over a decade of editing the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) (http://apod.gsfc.nasa.gov/), I'm still awed by the way art and science come together in astronomical images. In the last few years it has been particularly gratifying to see a major increase in APOD contributions from astro-imagers with very modest equipment. I’d like to look briefly at the history and operation of APOD, a site that presents images from robotic spaceships, space-based observatories, and professional and amateur observatories alike. I’ll discuss recent submissions with an eye toward those from the amateur community.
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