Highlights

Growing up in Louisville

A love of books and a curiosity about physics influenced by television, books and most importantly new friends

Learning encouraged and enabled by family and teachers, a summer at the University of Tennessee, and early admissions to the University of Louisville

A welcoming and supportive small program in physics at the university

The laboratory of Joel Gwinn

The atomic spectroscopy group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Selection as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow

Acceptance at Johns Hopkins University

Friendship with Peter Antich

Helen

A tenure track job at the University of Louisville

Good luck in the draft lottery and selection process

Clara

Grants - NSF, DOE, AFRL, NASA, DH

Horses - Zane, Unbaroquen, Cashmere, Sunny, Chance

Kitties - Tumble, Lyman, Balmer, Paschen, Ben, Fluffy,  AJ, Frances

Mentors - James Fowler, Joel Gwinn, Brian Judd, Hank Crosswhite, Frank Tomkins

Students - Krishna Myneni, Jim Lattis, Ron Brashear, Jeff Hay, Karen Collins, Elijah Jensen,  and many many others

Colleagues - Nicole Allard, Hank and Hannah Crosswhite, Frank Tomkins, Frank Clark, Brad Carter, Karen Collins

Helen reminded me that we are the result of our past and it is the way in which we journeyed to the present that is interesting to someone else.  I'm often asked  a variation on "How did you become interested in astronomy?" On some days this translates in my mind to "How did you become interested in horses?", and on others  "How did you become interested in tractor repair?" The answer to them surely starts with the culture of the early 1950's since  I have only a few recollections of the late 40's when my father traveled for his work and my family was living  in Hartford Connecticut, Atlanta Georgia, Cleveland Ohio, and Des Moines Iowa. Our travels were always by train then, and one early memory is of a dark night in the dining car with a stop in a station and some refreshment before sleep,. There was another train stopped too, going the other way. Then in my memory it was moving and within moments the station's platform appeared, but it was moving too.  At first puzzled, it was at that moment when I discovered the relativity of motion for myself, and like many physicists before me I began to develop a curiosity about our world and how we perceived it.  

We settled in Louisville permanently in 1950 and in our apartment a year later the black and white television with Superman, Sky King, and Roy Rogers -- impossible physics, airplanes, and horses --  became part of my daily life.  MacAuthur Elementary was renamed "Rutherford" when the General was fired by Truman, and there  my first grade teacher, Mrs. Gresham, taught me to read and instilled a lifelong desire to  read books. The world was a safe place. I was riding a bicycle I could imagine was a pony.  The public library was within range and I was on my way.

We lived within a short exploratory walk from where the historic Douglas Park racecourse stood,  by then a thoroughbred training center for Churchill Downs.  There was a major tragic fire there in the fall of 1952 and surviving horses ran through our neighborhood in terror while flames and smoke filled the sky.  It was my initial up close experience with horses, and with the unpredictable side of nature.  By the time we moved to our first house only a few blocks away I was developing a curiosity about airplanes too.  It was under the flight path for Standiford Field, now Muhammad Ali International Airport, and with a schoolmate from a few houses away we had a friendly competition to identify the planes as they flew over at low altitude.  This was a transformative era for aviation with the DC-3 being replaced with the Martin 404 and others.  I had ridden in a DC-3 a few times with the family travels  and we went to the airport on special occasions to watch these planes land and take off.  I sought after stories about aviation and when the Beechmont Library's shelf was exhausted, science fiction came next.  One I remember to this day was Robert Heinlein's "Red Planet" written in 1949 but not read by me until sometime in the 50's.  It had ice skating on canals, and a creature not unlike a cat I know today.  My schoolmate and I began to experiment with building rockets, a dangerous thing to do but great fun.  We packed aluminum tubes with clipped ends from wood matches, and plugged both ends with a bottle cap secured with a dab of glue.  One cap had a hole and when we set them pointing up, once lit we could get a good range from it.  Our greatest achievement was to launch one from the front yard that went over the roof to the back.  Both of us survived uninjured, thanks in part to caps that would pop off to relieve overpressure.  I do recall creating a fuse to fire them safely from a distance by using the inside of a photo flash bulb and connecting it to a battery.   I did not know much about electricity or chemistry then, and this is an early example of learning by figuring things out from what we have on hand.

My mother's family had moved to Louisville from Owensboro in the 30's.  Her sisters, my aunts,  were teachers before then, and in Louisville they took jobs as proofreaders for the CT Dearing printing company that had started its business in 1928.  Both continued working until retirement age, and Alberta brought home overrun printing  of softbound books to give to her son Gary and to me.  Gary was a decade older than me.  When he went to the University of Kentucky as a Air Force ROTC candidate, he chose physics as his field of study.  He would tell me what he was learning, and eventually he passed along his books, including Baker's Astronomy which is the first astronomy textbook I had to study.  He also gave me a pair of beautiful bound volumes about science as Christmas gifts, and I returned to them for years afterward.  Alberta's gifts included the occasional ones on astronomy, and about 1957 there was  one that had a back-page list of astronomy clubs, including the Louisville Astronomical Society.  This was the era of Sputnik and rising public interest in space. The "LAS" as it is still known had a few senior members of dedicated amateur astronomers, and a large organization of "juniors" as they were called.  The junior group was organized by Virginia Lipphard, whose daughter many years before had been a member.  They had a public event at the main Louisville library one Saturday, and I rode the bus down to see what it was about.  There I met Ed Novak, my age, on the steps with his telescope showing sunspots to anyone who would look.  Ed became my best friend, and as we grew older his experiences and education guided mine.  

We could not afford a telescope of the kind that Ed had, and my father got a spotting telescope for me at a pawn shop. It was a 2-inch diameter low power refractor designed to look at terrestrial targets, and we would drive to the top of Iroquois Park's hills to the overlooks and use it to view the city.  At night I tried it on the sky, not really knowing what I was finding among the bright objects that I could manage to point at.  That is when I had my first view of Saturn through a telescope from the sidewalk in front of our house.  Even at low magnification I could see the rings, and it was an exciting experience. Two years later we moved to the suburbs, I think to relocate me to a better school because middle school was a terror with its bullies and structure to train male students to be industrial workers. However at my new school I met the most amazing and helpful teachers anyone could ask for.  Each one deserves a call out:  Mr. Tichenor taught me biology, Dr. Hamilton taught chemistry, Mr. Kidd taught civics, Ms. Dietrich taught German, Mrs. Kumer guided my English, and Mr. Fowler mentored me in mathematics. The skies in this semi-rural area were dark then, and from our back porch I could see the Milky Way, and Orion stood out as well as it does in any very dark site today.  I saved money to buy a 4-inch telescope, the same kind that Ed had used to show sunspots, and with it learned how to find faint Messier Objects with the guide of star maps.  A decade later I passed this telescope on to my cousin Gary, and he had it in his home at the time of his passing in 2023.  

In the meantime, Ed was in the prestigious local St. Xavier high school receiving a traditional  formal education in physics and mathematics, so from him I learned what it was I needed to learn.  My own high school math teacher kindly let me be an independent learner, and he provided books from the Andover Academy for me to study algebra and geometry while others in the class were drilling in basic math.  Ed encouraged me to enroll in a summer class on matrices at St. X, and I was ready for that level because of this preparation.

There were others in the "juniors" during that era who went on to successful careers. Richard Gott, now a retired professor at Princeton, became an astronomer/cosmologist.  Daniel Kleinman who was a science whiz and mathematician then, and became a movie director and writer.  Ed got his undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Chicago, then entered a doctoral program in astronomy at Northwestern but he enlisted into the Air Force because of the draft.  On return from duty, he entered a doctoral program in nuclear physics at West Virginia University and left it for a career in applied nuclear physics with the Department of Defense working near Cincinnati, Ohio.  Charles Allen went to Duke and became an attorney and then a force in the Astronomical League, an organization of public astronomy clubs assisting amateur astronomy and young scientists. All of us had experience at Star Lane where the society had completed its 20-inch telescope entirely hand-crafted by their members.  We were the nightly users of this largest telescope available to amateurs in the country at that time.  

Before we moved to the suburbs my transportation was usually my bicycle or the bus.  The Beechmont library and Parkway Stables were in bicycle range, and a bus line to the main Library near Broadway was an inexpensive trip too.  We could afford an occasional lesson at the stables where I was regular rider on Blaze, a spirited fellow who knew what he should not do.  We got along very well, and with a usual group of 3 riders and sometimes the stable manager we would go down the bridle path to Iroquois park, and circle around its forest to return on time.  We had wonderful experiences there and I learned the ways of a horse, if not the skill of a rider.   Sadly my friends moved on as they grew up, the distance to the stables was too much for a frequent visit once we moved, and then the stable closed and the city forbade riding along the parkway.  I did not ride another horse until Zane arrived in our lives, more than 20 years later, thanks to my daughter.

While in 10th grade in 1960 to 61 I learned from Daniel Kleinman about the NSF Summer Workshop at University of Tennessee.  Those funded residential programs were planned by university faculty who took responsibility for about 30 participants to live in the dormitory on campus and take college classes in chemistry and physics. I wrote to them asking to be admitted  with my highschool's endorsement, and was accepted for the summer of 1961.  My chemistry class was a success, and in those 6 weeks I learned enough basic chemistry to be ready for a second year of high school chemistry, and later to be more than prepared for a college class.  Contrast it with physics, where the routine problems were solvable but the big picture was elusive. I did not take physics in high school.  It would have been a senior year course but I left before then.  The workshop rated students at the end and I had a "first", which surprised me because I knew I struggled with physics.  I suppose now looking back, everyone did.  The following junior year in high school my chemistry teacher let me spend the class hour in the lab working through the experiments of a college chemistry lab, and my history teacher sent me to the library to read history.  There I was a table mate with a senior who was on a career path to be a physician.  I remember that one day he gave me the catalog from the University of Louisville and pointed out that they had an "Early Admissions" program he thought that I should try for.  My mother may have had some doubts, and there were real costs for tuition for the family, but she supported my application.  I had an interview with the Arts and Sciences Dean Barber, a professor of philosophy and ethics who was a traditional thoughtful caring academic, in contrast to the professional managers we have in the current era of education as a business.  There was some risk for me too, since I was giving up the last year of high school with the bargain that after finishing the first year at university I would graduate with my high school class too.  There were no high school courses involved, and I moved on to college while trying to keep the high school social contacts.  Those I missed most were a group of juniors during my last year there who were selected to attend a Saturday Science event at General Electric's Appliance Park.  This was the city's largest employer with an enormous complex of factory buildings and a research center for the manufacturing of washers, driers, stoves and refrigerators.  GE employed physicists, chemists, and engineers, and one weekend a month they invited us to presentations on Saturday morning.  It was fun and foundation for the social side of science, which is a collective endeavor today.  Our little group dispersed of course, though one I knew well  became a veterinarian, and others  became teachers and managers, none went into science.   I'm sure that all of us were equally intelligent and motivated, and yet our paths diverged quickly.

For the fall of 1962 when I entered the the University of Louisville as a freshman, I had the daily commute in a 1957 VW Beetle that my father got for me, and spent hours in the campus library and at home grasping with the change in expectations. Professor Stevens introduced me to college courses with his English classes that year.  The first one taught me how to take a college course and to be thorough and careful in submitting work for his assessment.    The stress was less in the second semester.  My first physics class that year was with Professor Donald Bennett who had taught physics for 30 years in the same way he was taught.  It was an algebra-based physics class in the era of sliderules and learning by rote how to solve problems.  Nevertheless, I got a comprehensive introduction to physics that I could grasp  and use.  By the second year I was taking separate courses in mechanics and optics, after having had a year of calculus from Professor Sprague in the mathematics department.  By then I had a full scholarship, and Sprague offered me a job as a grader for calculus papers too.  Mechanics was taught by Professor Carl Adams.  The most informative thing I learned in that class was that all of the struggles with algebra-based dynamics went away in a couple of lines of calculus.  I was left with a feeling that we could have started there, and yet the point was that by working through it the hard way my mind was trained to understand what was underneath the symbolism  for methodology of Newtonian calculus. In that second year I met Joel Gwinn, who joined the department as an Assistant Professor in the same year I had become a student, and over the years that followed  he became my colleague and friend. 

Joel invited me to join his lab  he was developing to do atomic spectroscopy.  The department had previously had Professor Ralph Loring, who had passed away, and left a legacy interest in the field but little to use.  By the 60's, basic atomic spectroscopy was on the wane as a hot topic in physics after a half century of providing the data that led to quantum mechanics and enabled astronomers to determine the temperature and composition of stars.    Joel brought research into the effects of collisions on atomic spectral lines, and several unresolved basic issues in spectra line formation for which careful experiments could provide the needed data.  The university did not provide money to start a lab, but there were small grants and donated resources that could help.  When I met Joel for the first time he was in a teaching lab with a short length of solder, the entire supply, preparing a repair on an instrument for electrical measurements. His research space was to be in the former Ford car plant, then known as the "Reynolds Building", which was an addition to university property between two main railroad lines a 5 minute walk from the department's offices and classrooms.  I was enlisted to help set up his lab and I watched his first master's students develop their research.  He had a new photographic spectrograph that required a darkroom to process the spectra recorded on 35 mm film, and measurement with an microscope and stage by eye.  It was from him and these students that I learned about a phenomena called a "satellite band", and that it was of uncertain origin attributed to the presence of a foreign atom near an emitting or absorbing atom.  That problem and its resolution was a focus of my own work for a couple of decades, and in those first years together we had a joint struggle to become contributors to a larger community of atomic physicists who had worked on it for years before us.  

Joel was accepted into a summer faculty research program at Oak Ridge where he spent several months with his family and became part of the atomic and molecular spectroscopy group there, with Paul Griffin, George Werner, and Ken Vandersluis.  Paul arranged for the donation or loan of surplus equipment to the university, and we soon acquired two classic large spectrographs that I helped to set up and learned to adjust for optimal performance.  These used glass photographic plates to record spectra, and with them I mastered the art of spectroscopy as it had been practiced for decades.  By my third year at the university, Paul had suggested two projects that I worked on, both unrelated to the satellite band one that seemed so intriguing.  The first of these was to determine the effect of a narrow slit on the polarization of the light which passed through it.  Polarization is a diagnostic for the Zeeman effect, the splitting of spectral lines by external magnetic fields which can be used to identify the angular momentum of atomic states involved in transition.  He knew that a thick slit, meaning that light passes along a surface on its way out, could polarize the light.  He wanted to find out if a thin slit, say one in a metallic film, would polarize light.  We developed an experiment to test it, built an instrument to measure the light which passed through a slit with precision, and set about collecting data.  We made the slits at Oak Ridge by evaporating materials  and shadowing a wire on a quartz substrate to leave a slit the width of the wire.  The central idea was to compare dielectric (that is non-conducting) slits with metallic slits, so we created slits with zinc sulfide, aluminum, and silver as well as multilayered ones in various materials.   My unexpected discovery was that light that passed through a semitransparent wall would interfere with light that passed through the opening and create a complex pattern determined by the material, its thickness, the slit width, and the distances from the source to the point of observation.  There was no theory then to explain this. Ken suggested that the solution was to apply the formal theory of Fresnel diffraction to the problem and he directed me to Born and Wolf's classical monograph on optics.  When I had worked out an answer, Ken programmed the Oak Ridge computer to calculate and plot the patterns.  The marvelous outcome of agreement was my reward and the work became my master's dissertation in the summer of 1966. The polarization study  was for the most part a null result, that is very little polarizing effect could be measured with the instrument for thin slits. It was my senior thesis that same year.  

Joel, Paul, Ken, and my friend Ed Novak had advised me that a degree in physics was necessary for a career in astrophysics.  I was surprised to find though that once I had started with optics and atomic physics, I preferred to continue with it instead of redirecting into astronomy.  The second problem that Paul had suggested was to analyze a device called a plasma jet, and I was experimenting with one over a the last two years as a student in Louisville.  He loaned us the device, which is a chamber with a cone shaped anode and a tungsten cathode through which a gas such as argon is introduced at atmospheric pressure.  The argon displaces air, moves up through an aperture in the anode, and when an arc is established makes a stable plasma source.  We wanted to do diagnostics on the plasma to find its  ion and electron temperatures and the degree of ionization so that when a fluid containing a dissolved  compound is aspirated into the gas flow we could understand the resulting spectrum.   Because of my rising interest in spectral line shapes and satellite bands, my intent was to introduce cesium and see what the spectrum looked like.  We knew that a little table salt would create a brilliant sodium emission, so a cesium salt should do too.

The result was immediately puzzling because with cesium there were no cesium spectral lines.  That's as far as we got at the time, and it looked like this could be good project for a doctoral dissertation with the right support and facilities.  But where? There were three institutions we knew of that had promise:  the University of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Maryland. Yale too seemed like an appropriate one because of the develop of laser science there.  Hopkins was my first choice because there were two key faculty, and it was the former home of R.W. Wood who had a fascinating history of contributions to optics.  When I was selected to be a Woodrow Willson Fellow, the first year funding may have opened opportunities I would not have had otherwise, and I had a very strong score on the physics graduate record exam to help too.  All of the schools accepted me (though Maryland was not enthusiastic and Yale said that they did not do atomic spectroscopy), and the idea of working with faculty who were interested in atomic spectra and plasmas in a lab with advanced instrumentation drew me to Hopkins. 

I moved to Baltimore in August 1966, into an apartment in a building that formerly was a home for F. Scott Fitzgerald, and where a koi pond was a greeting at the front door.  I was not thinking then about astronomy or astrophysics.  I wanted to understand deeply how atoms emitted and absorbed light, and what could happen in their environment to modify i the intrinsic characteristics of their spectra. I had an opportunity sooner than I had expected because their doctoral program was flexibly adjusted for each student.  I tested out of required core courses except for electromagnetic theory, and that  opened an opportunity to take classes in atomic structure theory from Professor Brian Judd, and classes in plasma physics and quantum optics, while fulfilling remaining  required oral exams in optics and modern physics, and a  Russian language exam. In the meantime I talked with Professor Judd about perhaps doing theoretical physics and he wisely urged me to meet with Dr. Henry Crosswhite and see if there was  project that would interest me that had laboratory spectroscopy.  They wereworking on the issues of how rare earth ions  were affected by the field of crystals in which atoms may be fixed, central to understanding both the atomic and crystal physics, and to developing lasers based on crystalline oscillators.  We quickly settled on the problem of triply ionized gadolinium, that is the "fourth" spectrum of gadolinium, and set about experimenting with possible light sources to be the target of an effort to collect data.   By the beginning of my second year at Hopkins I was a doctoral candidate  and could spend my time at research.  

I met Peter Antich the first day in my electromagnetic theory class. which had other brilliant students who were intimidating in their knowledge and experience too.  Peter was a Yugoslav from Italy and he had a doctorate already.  We both had to work very hard to do well in this class though, which posed the most difficult and classic questions on the weekly homework assignments.  This forced me to learn care in long analytical solutions and some mathematics I had not seen so far, and it prepared me to teach the same subject later to unwary students who too would be required to do the classics.  Peter and I talked more often of philosophy, the frontiers of physics, and life in Baltimore.  It was through him that I met Helen one evening when she was collecting spilled punched reader tape from the floor of the high energy physics computing center.  Helen was then employed as a scanner to identify  bubble chamber events recorded on film.  The analysis of high energy physics events is a long process dependent on building reliable statistics, while with atomic spectra the task is precision measurement, identification, and sorting through the data to make some sense of it.  I was finished by the spring 1969 with what could be done then with the gadolinium ion, while Peter was at Hopkins for another two years.  

While I was working on the rare earth ion problem with NSF support through Dr. Crosswhite's grant, I was immersed in another growing effort at space-based astronomy.  The work led by William Fastie and Professor Warren Moos had facets with telescopes in sounding rockets launched from White Sands, New Mexico, and in aeronomy with measurement from space and from the ground.  Fastie had designed the big 5-meter echelle spectrograph that was required for my spectra,  and the rocket work often used space nearby for assembling their instruments.  Other students of Crosswhite and Moos were engaged with crystal spectra too, looking into the transmission through samples cooled to liquid helium temperatures and placed in strong magnetic fields to create Zeeman splitting.  For those who did space-based work at that time, it was all about a few seconds above the atmosphere to capture a brief spectrum from the moving rocket payload.  Years of work took the ride along with the detectors and sensors.

By the spring of 1969 the University of Louisville offered me a tenure track job with 9 months of salary and a future I could plan on if I was not drafted.  There was also a postdoc offer opportunity in Norfolk, Virginia, for a few years, and perhaps most tempting, the possibility of working at Princeton in astronomy that developed through a contact that Dr. Crosswhite had suggested.  That would be on the original career path I had in mind when I started in physics, but the faculty offer was firm and in hand, so I accepted it and joined the faculty on July 1, 1969.  However, once at Louisville there were new opportunities astrophysics.

For one, the University of Louisville was a municipal institution when I joined the faculty, and it entered the Kentucky higher education system in the following year in 1970.  There was some help from the central administration to set up a lab and start experimental work in renovated space in the Natural Science Building.  The Research Corporation funded equipment purchases that were intended to enable the spectroscopy I had done at Hopkins to continue in Louisville too.  However the critical change came with the state providing funds for an observatory that would house the former Star Lane telescope, now donated to the University, a radio telescope that was then on the roof of the Speed School electrical engineering building, and be a test facility for solar heating and cooling engineering.  With approval from John Dillon who was the Dean of the Graduate School at that time, and by the state legislature, planning for construction began in 1974 and the facility was dedicated in 1978.  We had students doing graduate research there soon after.  Eventually the radio component could not be implemented because of the difficult of moving the antenna, and the heating and cooling experiment finished within a few years, so that by 1980 the observatory was solely for optical astronomy with the former Star Lane telescope.  In the meantime, the laboratory work had been successful in generating new data on spectral line shapes, and after the Louisville tornado of April 1974 I was given an early sabbatical to return to Hopkins and work with Henry and Hannah Crosswhite on hydrogen spectra and laser spectroscopy.  Just as that was to begin, however, they accepted an offer to relocate their research to the Chemistry Division at Argonne National Labs in the fall.  After a summer in Baltimore, Helen, Clara and I moved to Chicago where I worked with the Crosswhites and  with Frank Tomkins to learn the methods of laser spectroscopy, offering exciting new methods of studying energy transfer between excited states in gases. Hannah helped me develop code to make difficult numerical calculations of spectral line profiles, while students in my lab were producing new data .   Papers from these efforts supported applications to the National Science Foundation for funding, and also led to a new collaboration with Nicole Allard at the Observatory of Paris-Meudon.  My work had closed the circle and the line shape studies had application in modeling of stellar atmospheres and spectra.   I was visiting in Meudon when a graduate student called me from Louisville to say the NSF had called us and needed to discuss a budget for an award. Work on spectral line shapes and atomic collisions continued on for20 years with support from NSF that transitioned to support from DOE.  Frank and the  Crosswhites retired from Argonne in the mid-1980's, while Frank continued to collaborate with occasional trips to Louisville for a few years to help with 4-wave mixing experiments  to produce tunable vacuum ultraviolet laser light.  

As the laboratory work on spectral line shapes reached its conclusion in 2002,  two new impactful opportunities arose. For the lab research  we obtained funding from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory to develop state of the art sensors for space-based surveillance through contracts beginning in 2005 and continuing though 2009.  The AFRL contracts  provided for the 0. 6 meter MORC telescope at Moore Observatory which replaced the original Star Lane telescope with a modern instrument so that we could observe satellites.  This program supported Jeff Hay's research on the detection and analysis of small changes in optical signals, leading eventually to a patent and his spin off company RDI.  The technology we developed was applied to the analysis of infrastructure health with funding from the Department of Homeland Security through a Kentucky agency.  The most recent funding for this effort wasa  contract from the AFRL in 2022 to study thermal infrared emission from low-Earth-orbit satellites as a diagnostic of the operational state. 

In collaboration with the Rauch Planetarium and Gheens Science Center we had grants from NASA to develop resources that would provide astronomy to schools.  These funded planetarium components, and established the collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland where Professor Bradley Carter and his colleague Rhodes Hart guided the installation and operation of 0.5 meter and 0.7 meter telescopes at Mt. Kent, and we installed  a 0.5 meter telescope at Moore Observatory to be a twin of the southern hemisphere one.  The observational facilities  were conceived for remote astronomy education with capability of delivering live observing during the daytime to classes from sites in the dark in the opposite hemisphere.  With technical help from Drew Foster and the administrative guidance of Ron Moore (then Vice President for Information Technology at U of L) we had immersive visualization capability in the main planetarium dome, and laptops with large room displays in a classroom  as well as video conferencing to the Mt. Kent site.  The project was encouraged and supported by the Kentucky Department of Education, but unfortunately met resistance from Jefferson County Public Schools on the basis that it was not developed by them, and that their classroom teachers had a fixed curriculum and very limited time to add anything not addressing the testing requirements.  When the Planetarium operations were moved from Information Technology to the School of Education and Human Development, Robert Felner, then the Dean of the School, abruptly withdrew support. Felner was subsequently convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison in 2010.  His unexpected and unjustifiable decision completely altered the intent of our education effort, which was redirected to our university students through the development of educational resources and opportunities for research.  Shared Skies continues this mission today, limited as it is by funding and human resources.

The new capabilities we had when MORC was made operational were turned to the analysis of exoplanet transits with the doctoral dissertation research of Karen Collins which arose when a collaboration emerged with the Kilo-degree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) planet search program at Ohio State and Vanderbilt universities.  Karen developed the software and skills to extract a few parts per thousand deep transits out of time series photometry with MORC, and we used the methods to make observations from the southern hemisphere as well.  When Karen was awarded her doctorate in 2015 she had postdoctoral positions at Vanderbilt and then at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, and is now on the staff of  theCfA leading support for ground-based spectrophotometric confirmation of TESS planets.

Mark Manner, an attorney in Nashville, was a participant in the KELT photometry effort using his 0.6 meter RC that was located in Tennesee.  He moved the telescope to a leased site at Mt. Lemmon Observatory, and then in 2016 he donated it to the University of Louisville.  We operate it remotely now, largely for TESS transit followup. Initially the cost of operation was approximately $30,000 a year for the agreement with the University of Arizona, and it was funded by income from our Distance Education tuition revenue sharing.  As DE course enrollment grew, the income was more than needed for the lease costs, and we were able to update the telescope cameras there, at Mt. Kent, and at Moore and provide for maintenance as well.  However, when the COVID pandemic affected university operations in 2020 and 2021, the university stopped sharing tuition revenue for distance education classes with host departments and colleges.  Since then the annual costs of operations have been met by grant, contract, and gift funds supplemented by residual funds from milestone contracts.  

TESS was launched at Cape Canaveral in April, 2018, and public data was made available soon afterward.  The TESS ground-based followup known as TFOP organizes our contributions to planet discovery.  In anticipation of its success, we joined the Minerva Australis Consortium in 2017 as a founding partner.  Minerva operates now with a dependence on a budget from the University of Southern Queensland, and is directed by Prof. Duncan Wright at USQ. Duncan and Ian Waite provide the site support for our telescopes there and lack of funds here prevents us from fairly compensating USQ for its contributions to operational costs.  It also limits as a consequence the operational status of our telescopes there today, which have not been often usable since the untimely sad passing of my friend Rhodes Hart in 2020. We are presently discussing with Duncan, Ian, and Brad about how we can restore the CDK700 to a state that will allow remote operation since in-person operation, as we did when Rhodes was there, is not feasible now except for occasional  targeting.

That brings us to the present day, and the story continues. Moore Observatory is working well.  The campus lab is being returned to a functional state after a building renovation.   We have a little funding from NASA to keep the Mt. Lemmon telescope running, and a small operational budget from the university for the observatory.  There is no ongoing funded lab work, but there is an anticipated revenue from the milestone contract with AFRL that just concluded and will allow a continuation of the AFRL research topic.

Francis, the observatory kitty who appeared during the COVID era, now lives inside and has no inclination to living rough again.  

A new semester is about to start and IT policy is requiring me to move my online content to sites outside the University, so here we are.