Space

(If you're looking for my blog posts about space stuff, click here to avoid reading a bio.)


My Accidental Astronomy Career

As a child, I would lie awake at night, wondering whether the universe was infinite – and if it wasn't infinite, if I went to the edge of it, and threw a fork beyond it, what I'd be throwing the fork into.

Why a fork, you ask?  Well, why not a fork?


Other than trips to museums and planetariums, books, one middle-of-the-night road trip to the Atlantic Ocean to see Halley's Comet in 1986, and being a fan of the Space Shuttle and Hubble Space Telescope like everyone else, I didn't have any special interest in space or astronomy. After dropping out of college, I made a decent living working with computers for a decade or so, but eventually I found myself looking for computer work in a town where the nicest computer setups were at astronomical observatories.  


Volunteering

A friend who worked in astronomy suggested that I get a foot in the door by volunteering at the Visitor Information Station, part of the mid-level Onizuka Center for International Astronomy on Mauna Kea, so I began as a volunteer in May of 2004, helping with the evening stargazing program and gift shop, doing trail maintenance, and learning to lead the weekend Guided Summit Tours.  Volunteers have their meals in the same dining hall as the observatory staff and astronomers, which provides many opportunities to talk to people and get to know potential future co-workers.


UH88


In August of 2004, I was hired as a part-time operator of the 88-inch (2.2-meter) telescope run by the University of Hawaii's graduate Institute for Astronomy, on Mauna Kea.  My experience in computing and technology was a plus, since the telescope — like all large modern telescopes — was controlled by computers.  What little knowledge of astronomy I brought to the job, I had acquired as a volunteer.  I picked up a bit more while operating the telescope a few nights each month for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and professors — some of whom were quite prominent in their areas of research.  I also had opportunities to participate in outreach, driving VIPs up for tours of the summit, helping out with public science festivals, and even doing outreach in support of NASA's Deep Impact mission.


Lasers


In mid-2005, I got another part-time job, this time as an occasional "spotter" for the adaptive-optics laser at the W.M. Keck Observatory.  This time, my experience working and volunteering on the summit was a plus, but I didn't need to know much about computers or astronomy to stand outside and look for any airplanes that might get near the laser's beam, as well as for clouds or fog.  In the spring of 2006, I started doing the same kind of work at the Gemini North telescope.


Although this job didn't really involve much in the way of astronomy, it provided a lot of opportunities to see satellites going overhead, including the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, to get paid to watch meteor showers, and to interact with astronomers and operators at some of the largest telescopes in the world.  I also had plenty of time to practice long-exposure photography and time-lapse photography, with some very interesting subjects.


Supernovae

Where's the Kaboom?

Since 2004, the 88-inch telescope had been frequently used by the Nearby Supernova Factory.  This group of cosmologists from various high-energy physics laboratories and universities in the United States and France studied supernovae (stars exploding with a force equal to ten billion billion billion megatons of TNT) as part of research into "dark energy." 


The leaders of the collaboration hatched a plan to teach the telescope operators to handle their highly scripted, computer-controlled observations.  As the "techie" among the operators, I became the guinea-pig for the plan, taking on yet another part-time job as a Participating Technical Guest in the Physics Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in May of 2007.  In July 2008, I was named an associate member of the collaboration, and that September, received my own email and such at the lab.  I was also instructed to assemble a curriculum vitae, because starting in 2009, I would be a Research Assistant paid by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.


Grad School... wait, what?  Me?

By this point, I had been applying for full-time jobs in astronomy — and not getting them — for a few years, and had started thinking about going back to school and taking some classes in something work-related.  After all, everyone I worked with either had a Ph.D. or was about to get one, and it might help if I had something beyond a high-school diploma.  My collection of part-time jobs made traditional classes impractical, so I applied to Swinburne University of Technology's online graduate program in astronomy, and was accepted to complete a Graduate Certificate of Science — solely on the basis of my work experience and the curriculum vitae that turned out surprisingly well.


Subaru


A few weeks before my classes started in early 2009, both Gemini North and the Subaru Telescope — the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's flagship 8.2-meter optical telescope, also sited on Mauna Kea — posted advertisements for full-time operators.  I applied to both, and after a couple interviews and a bit of paperwork, was hired in the middle of my first semester as a Night Operation Assistant at Subaru in May of 2009.  As a result, I resigned my positions operating the 88-inch telescope and spotting aircraft for the Keck laser.


I went on to complete the classwork for my Graduate Certificate of Science (Astronomy) from Swinburne during 2009, while training to operate Subaru itself as well as two of its instruments — the wide-field Subaru Prime-focus Camera (Suprime-Cam) and the High Definition Spectrograph (HDS).  I also passed the 1,000-hour lifetime mark as a volunteer, and was awarded "Hoku Volunteer" status.


In 2010, I trained on the Multi-Object Infra-Red Camera and Spectrograph (MOIRCS) and Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS), and received my Graduate Certificate from Swinburne.  I was unable to attend the graduation ceremony, because two nights earlier I had to operate Suprime-Cam... for the deputy director of Swinburne's astronomy department!  That fall, I was promoted to Observation System Associate, and have since begun training on the Infra-Red Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS) and our 188-element adaptive optics system (AO188).


Today


Today, most of my work in astronomy is as a Subaru Observation System Associate, working on the summit of Mauna Kea for 3-7 nights in a row, a couple times a month.  I still have things to learn, like the Cooled Mid-Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (COMICS) and the Fiber Multi-Object Spectrograph (FMOS), as well as things that are still in development, like the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme AO system (SCExAO) and our new wider-field camera, Hyper-Suprime-Cam.


During my weeks off, I spend occasional evenings observing supernovae from home, and when I have time, I still lead summit tours or volunteer at the nightly stargazing program.  I'm also still involved in outreach, now representing Subaru at public events like the annual Ellison Onizuka Science Day, giving occasional tours of the observatory, and visiting elementary-school classrooms as part of the annual Journey Through The Universe program, to tell little kids that there are jobs where you can stay up all night, sleep all day, and eat all the ice cream you want.  I'm also planning to re-enroll at Swinburne and take eight more classes to earn a Master's in Astronomy, as finances permit.


(What? You read all that stuff? Okay, click here for my blog posts about space stuff.)