Sten Odenwald
Sten Odenwald is an astronomer who, among his many education projects, runs the website Astronomy Cafe, and is a researcher studying the cosmic infrared background and space weather. Since he received his PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1982, he has been an active astronomer in the Washington, D.C. area, primarily at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Biography
He was born in Karlskoga, Sweden and emigrated to California with his family in 1955. He grew up in Oakland, where he attended school, and was an avid and precocious amateur scientists from the age of 5, when he 'encountered' his first dinosaur. This led to interests in biology, chemistry, geology and electronics. He created insect collections, rock collections, had pet hamsters, snakes, lizards and turtles. He built his first radio at age 10, and his first telescope at age 11. His interest in astronomy was kindled by his father's pointing out the stars in Orion's Belt one winter night, and the advent of the Outer Limits TV program! By high school, he had built a second telescope, an 8-inch reflector, and began a program of astrophotography. As a Boy Scout (Eagle Badge 1969) he always took a camera and tripod with him to photograph the stars at night during camping trips. He would develop these black/white photos in his own dark room.
Upon graduation from Fremont High School, attended U.C. Berkeley. While there, his fondest memories involved learning about Calculus and advanced mathematics, teaching himself tensor analysis so that he could understand General Relativity, and quantum theory. These were all 'mind expanding' moments for him, creatively and even spiritually. He received his Bachelors Degree in Astronomy in 1975, and following a relaxing summer hiking and camping in the high country of Yosemite, he went off to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard University as a graduate student in Astronomy. His first thesis advisor was Prof. George Field, and together they spent several years studying accretion disks around supermassive black holes. This did not turn out to be a very profitable undertaking because there was almost no data to constrain any of their ideas about what these systems were, physically. He then worked with Dr. Giovanni Fazio, and completed his PhD by investigating the far-infrared properties of the Milky Way's galactic center - purportedly the stomping grounds of a million-solar-mass black hole. He spent many months in Palestine, Texas participating in high-altitude balloon launches involving the 1-meter infrared telescope that Fazio and his team had built in 1975.
Odenwald then moved to Washington DC in 1982, where he worked as a post-Doc at the Space Sciences Division of the Naval Research Laboratory until 1990. After a brief stint working for NASA headquarters pursuing education projects, he joined Dr. Mike Hauser with the COBE Team in 1992, working on the Diffuse Infrared background Experiment (DIRBE). This led to several independent studies of extra-galactic objects, and collaborations with Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky and Dr. John Mather, who were investigating the cosmic infrared background, which as yet had not been detected by 1997. Once the COBE program ended, Odenwald continued his collaboration with Kashlinsky and Mather with the help of a 5-year NASA research grant. Odenwald was also hired, full time, to oversee the education activities of the IMAGE satellite, as well as help form the NASA Sun-Earth Connection Education Forum. Since 1998, research interests have increasingly turned to space weather, and specifically the way in which solar storms cause economic damage to satellites in space.
Work
Odenwald currently works under contract to NASA at the Goddard Spaceflight Center, particularly in education-related areas of space science. Although he continues his work on the cosmic infrared background, his interests have moved into space weather research, mainly because the field is still very open, and his particular interests present new fertile ground for research. His most recent papers simulate the economic impacts of very large solar 'superstorms' to our commercial satellite network - a far cry from cosmology and the research he conducted as an astronomer. His education efforts have also led to TV programs for NASA, radio interviews and other opportunities to foster public education and interest in astronomy and space research.
Odenwald elected not to compete for academic positions in astronomy, because he wanted his family and children to have a stable geographic location from which to launch their own lives, rather than participate in the migratory patterns of typical astronomy post-docs. This has not been an easy sacrifice, since the Washington Area has few permanent academic opportunites for young astronomers, and most scientists work from grant-to-grant on what is called 'soft money'. Luckily, NASA is a large employer of astronomers, who can successfully remain employed if they are willing to alter their directions from time to time. For Odenwald, education was a natural extension of his personal and professional interests, at a time when NASA was increasingly being asked to take the lead in inspiring the next generation of engineers and scientists. These programs, in K-12 education, are called Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or 'STEM', which is prophetically similar to Odenwald's first name, and perhaps a sign that this new career direction was literally 'made for him'.
astronomycafe.net
The Astronomy Cafe is a website that Odenwald started back in 1995 as an experiment in public education using the new medium of the World Wide Web. Using the old Mosaic browser and a crude text editor, he wrote his first HTML pages, offering essays and collections of visual imagery in astronomy. Odenwald also started the Ask the Astronomer resource, where he invited people to send him via email a question about astronomy, and would then post the answers. Almost overnight The Astronomy Café started getting a huge traffic to the site, and by 1998 the Ask the Astronomer resource had reached 3000 FAQs. Odenwald decided to stop posting new FAQs after that, mainly because the questions had become repetitive. Ask the Astronomer still remains a popular destination, and gets over 70,000 visitors to this page each month. Over the years, Odenwald has created many web resources in astronomy, especially over at NASA.
Books
- Sten Odenwald(2002). Patterns in the Void: Why nothing is important. Westview Press, ISBN 0-8133-3938-3
- Sten Odenwald(2001). The 23rd Cycle: Learning to live with a stormy star. Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-12078-8
- Sten Odenwald(1998). The Astronomy Cafe. W.H. Freeman & Co., ISBN 0-7167-3278-5
- Sten Odenwald(2003). Back to the Astronomy Cafe. Westview Press, ISBN 0-8133-4166-3
- Sten Odenwald(2004). Stepping Through the Stargate. Benbella Press, ISBN 1-932100-32-6