Hello! One of the things that got me interested in a career in science was looking up at the night sky and wondering what was out there. My parents gave me a small telescope for Christmas. I would go out at night, put my telescope on our driveway, and look at the planets. With a small telescope, you can see some of Jupiter's moons orbiting around the planet, and you could even make out the Great Red Spot. You can also see Saturn and its rings. I grew up in northern Minnesota, where you can actually see the aurora borealis or northern lights fairly often. The first time I saw the northern lights was actually when I was outside at night with my telescope. I was really surprised to see them because we did not have space weather forecasts like we do now.

Hi! I started out as a night time, ground-based observer studying Gamma Ray Burst afterglows. It was fantastic, but I was kind of summoned over to the solar side with the incentive that I would be able to observe during the day. The ironic thing was that my first job was to operate a solar instrument in space, but I had to do so on Japan time, which meant that I was doing solar observing at night! D'oh. Very happy that I got to do that though of course.

For a while though, I was able to get my fix of nighttime observing through a program in the middle of Montana that would bring people from around the country to do fun things at a big ranch. One of their events was to have astronomers come and show them the night sky. That was just as much fun for me as it was for them!