Sten Odenwald

Sten Odenwald, astronomer and science popularizer

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.

At Harvard ,he was often found in his office at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the Perkins Annex. 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 at the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas participating in high-altitude balloon launches involving the 1-meter infrared telescope that Fazio and his team had built in 1975. While at Harvard, he was a Teaching Assistant for Prof. Owen Gingerich and David Latham in a course called Natural Sciences 9. He also helped Prof. Eric Chaisson with his wildly popular Astronomy-8 course, and Prof. David Layzer's course on the Philosophy of Science.

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

External links to my webpages

Technical Bibliography

"Present and Past Death-Rates for Globular Clusters" A.P. Lightman, W.H. Press, S.F. Odenwald The Astrophysical Journal, Vol.219, pg. 629.

"Far-Infrared Sources in the Vicinity of the Supernova Remnant W- 28" S. Odenwald, K. Shivanandan, G. Fazio, T. Rengarajan, B. McBreen, M. Campbell, H. Moseley, The Astrophysical Journal, v. 279, p. 162.

"A Far-Infrared Survey of the Galactic Center" S. Odenwald, G. Fazio The Astrophysical Journal, v. 283, p. 601.

"Observations of the Radio Noise Background in the Frequency Range 150 - 180 kHz" S. H. Knowles, F. J. Kelly, S. Odenwald, B. Waltman IES Symposium 1984, Alexandria, Va.

"Focal Plane Instrumentation for a 102-cm, Balloon Borne Infrared Telescope" K. Shivanandan, S. Odenwald, P. Schwartz, G. G. Fazio, H. Moseley. Technical Digest of the 9th International Conference on Infrared and Millimeter Waves, Osaka, Japan, 22-26 Oct. 1984.

"A Search for Infrared Excesses in G-Type Stars" S. Odenwald Proceedings of the First IRAS Symposium Light on Dark Matter

"Active Star Formation in NGC-2264" P. Schwartz, H. Thronson Jr., S.F. Odenwald, W. Glaccum, R. Loewenstein, G. Wolf The Astrophysical Journal. ,v. 292, 231.

"Far-Infrared Observations of the Molecular Cloud Near IC-443. ABS S. Odenwald, K. Shivanandan The Astrophysical Journal, v. 292, 460.

"Far-Infrared Observations of OB Stars in the Cygnus-X Region : DR-6, 7 and 22." S. Odenwald, M. Campbell, K. Shivanandan, G. Fazio, P. Schwarz and H. Moseley. The Astrophysical Journal v. 306, 122.

"Infrared Emission from G-Type Stars " S. Odenwald The Astrophysical Journal v. 307, 711

"CO and Far-IR Observations of Bright Spiral Galaxies in the Ursa Major I(S) Cluster" ABS S. Odenwald. The Astrophysical Journal v. 310, 86

"He3 Photometer System for Millimeter Wave Astronomy" K. Shivanandan, P. Schwartz, S. Odenwald and H. Moseley International Journal of IR and MM Waves 987, v. 8, No. 1.

"Hydrodynamic Phenomena in the Draco Molecular Cloud" ABS S. Odenwald, L. J. Rickard The Astrophysical Journal, v. 318, 702

"VLA Observations of a Complete Sample of Sources from the S-5 Catalogue" H. Kuhr, K. Johnston, S. F. Odenwald, Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement, v. 71, 493.

"Far-IR and Optical Studies of Comet-like Clouds: Mach Cones and Hydrodynamics?" S. Odenwald The Astrophysical Journal, v. 325, 320.

"VLA Observations of Far-IR Sources in the Galactic Center" S. Odenwald IAU Symposium 136: The Galactic Center, p. 205.

"DR-15 and DR-20: Far-Infrared and Radio Observations of Young B-star Nurseries" ABS S. Odenwald, M. Campbell, K. Shivanandan, G. Fazio, P. Schwartz and H. Moseley The Astronomical Journal, v. 99, 288.

"An IRAS Survey of Young Stellar Objects Towards the Cygnus-X Region" S. F. Odenwald The Astronomical Journal, v. 97, 801.

"The Origin of the Universe: Cosmogenesis Ex Nihilo" S. F. Odenwald Zygon, Vol. 25, No. 1, pg. 25.

"Five Unusual Compact CO Sources in the Cygnus-X Region" ABS S.F. Odenwald and P.R. Schwartz The Astrophysical Journal Letters, v. 345, L47.

"A New Infrared Camera for Astronomical Observations at 10 and 20 microns" ABS S.F. Odenwald, K. Shivanandan and H. Thronson Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific February, 1992.

"G110-13: A Low Mass Star Forming Region at High Galactic Latitude" ABS The Astrophysical Journal, September 20, 1992

"A CO Survey of IRAS-detected Young Stellar Objects Towards the Cygnus-X Region" ABS S.F. Odenwald and P.R. Schwartz The Astrophysical Journal, February 1991

"G0.281-0.47: A Crab-like SNR Towards the Galactic Center" ABS S.F. Odenwald and F. Yusef-Zadeh The Astrophysical Journal Letters,

"A Program for Integrating the HST Guide Star Catalog with Commonly Used Astronomical Databases" S.F. Odenwald Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Science with the Hubble Space Telescope, June 17-24, Sardinia Italy.

" The Cygnus-X Region: An IRAS View" Proceedings of the Back to the Galaxy Conference, Univ. of Maryland, October 12-14, 1992.

"Clustering of the Diffuse Infrared Light from the COBE DIRBE maps, I. C (O) and limits on the near-IR background," A. Kashlinsky, J.C. Mather, S. Odenwald, M.G. Hauser, The Astrophysical Journal, 470, 681, 1996

"Clustering of the diffuse infrared light from the COBE DIRBE maps.II. An all sky survey of C(0)", Kashlinsky,A., Mather,J. and Odenwald, S., The Astrophysical Journal(Letters),473, L9.

"A COBE/DIRBE Survey of Nearby Galaxies", S. Odenwald, J. Newmark and G. Smoot, The Astrophysical Journal, 1998, 500, 554.

"Clustering of the diffuse infrared light from the COBE/DIRBE maps. III. Power spectrum analysis and possible detection of cosmic infrared background fluctuations" Kashlinsky,A., and Odenwald, S. 2000, Ap.J. v. 528, 74.

"Detection of Small-Scale Fluctuations in the Near-IR Cosmic Infrared Background from Long-exposure 2MASS fields", 2002 Kashlinsky, A., Odenwald, S., Mather, J., Skrutskie, M. and Cutri, R., ApJ(Letters) 579, L53.

"Analysis of the Diffuse Near-Infrared Emission from 2MASS Deep Integration Data: Foregrounds Versus Cosmic Infrared Background", Odenwald, S., Kashlinsky, A, Mather, J., Skrutskie, M. and Cutri, A. 2003, ApJ 583, p. 535.

“Forecasting the Impact of an 1859-Calibre Superstorm on Satellite Resources’, Odenwald ,S., Green, J. and Taylor, W., 2006, Advances in Space Research, 38, p.280-297.

“Eyewitness Accounts of the 1859 Superstorm’, Green, J., Boardsen, S. and Odenwald, S., 2006, Advances in Space Research, 38, p.145-154.

"Forecasting the impact of an 1859-caliber superstorm on geosynchronous Earth- orbiting satellites: Transponder resources", Odenwald, S. F., and J. L. Green, 2007, Space Weather, 5, S06002, doi:10.1029/2006SW000262.

"Newspaper Reporting of Space Weather: The end of a Golden Era", 2007, Odenwald ,S.F., Journal of Space Weather, (Submitted)

"Statistical Estimates of Anomaly Rates for Geostationary Satellites", 2007 ,Odenwald ,S.F., Journal of Space Weather, (In Progress).

NASA Education Products

"Highlights: The Supporting Research and Technology Program Annual Report", 2003. NASA Headquarters/OSS (NP-2003-5-308-HQ)

"Space Weather", 2002, Educational CDROM

"Space Weather", 2001, NASA Lithograph Set, (LG-2001-9-034-GSFC)

"IMAGE: Revealing the Impacts of Invisible Solar Storms", 2001, NASA Lithograph (LG-2001-10-035-GSFC)

"Solar Storms and You", 2000, (EG-2000-03-002-GSFC)

"Are You Ready for Solar Max?", 2000, (EB-2000-02-005-GSFC)

"Hubble Space Telescope Slide Set", 1991, NASA/Office of Space Science.

Popular Science Writing

The Decay of the False Vacuum Astronomy, (11/1983)

The Planck Era Astronomy, Astronomy, (3/1984)

Astronomical Ballooning Astronomy, (8/1984)

Does Space Have More Than 3 Dimensions? Astronomy, (11/1984)

A Quickie Guide to Analyzing Data Astronomy, (2/1985)

Astronomical Ballooning Part III Astronomy, (8.1985)

Beyond the Big Bang Astronomy, (5/1987)

Night Views Astronomy, (8/1991)

Turning Pro: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Sky and Telescope, (2/1989)

The Cosmological Constant Sky and Telescope, (4/1991)

The Cosmological Redshift Explained Sky and Telescope, (2/1993)

The Final Frontier of Spacetime Sky and Telescope, (12/1995)

The Cosmological Constant Newton Magazine, (12/1991)

The Big Bang was NOT an Explosion The Washington Post, (5/10/1997)

Solar Storms: Coming to a sky near you The Washington Post, (3/10/1998)

Solar Storms: The silent menace Sky and Telescope, ( 3/2000)

What if String Theory is Wrong? Astronomy, February, 2007

Waiting for the Big One Sky and Telescope, July 2007.

The Sun - An Introduction Astronomy, November 2007

TV Appearances

Blackout!, NASA Education Video, September 1998.

NASA/CONNECT 'Having a Solar Blast' NASA TV, March 20, 2002.

NASA/CONNECT 'Dancing in the Night Sky', NASA TV, April 10, 2003

NASA 'Destination:Tomorrow', Program 10, February 20, 2003

KidzOnline Web Broadcast of Transit of Venus, February 19, 2004

NASA/CONNECT 'The Transit of Venus', NASA TV, March 19, 2004

NASA: Live 'The Transit of Venus', NASA TV, April 15, 2004

NASA/CONNECT 'Ancient Observatories', March 21, 2005

NASA Why Files 'The Case of the Technical Knock-out', April 21, 2005

NASA/CONNECT 'Eclipse 2006: In a Different Light', March 21,2006

Radio Appearances

'Earth and Sky Radio', Solar Superstorms, February 18, 2006

'Earth and Sky Radio', Transits and Exoplanets, June 8, 2004.

'Earth and Sky Radio' The Transit of Venus, June 4, 2004

'Let's Talk Stars', KTKT-Tucson, David Levy, April 13, 2004

'Let's Talk Stars', KTKT-Tucson, David Levy, September 24, 2002

'Sky Tour' , WHYY-NPR Philadelphia, June 20, 2002

'Earth and Sky Radio', Deborah Byrd, October 27, 2001

'Dreamland' , Whitley Streaber, April 8, 2001

'The Todd Mundt Show', NPR January 18, 2001

'Public Impact' , NPR, July 13, 1998