Epilogue
In my life, I have experienced astronomy from many different places and from many different perspectives.
I have experienced astronomy from JPL as Voyager 2's new Uranus ring occultation data arrived at my computer and as images of Miranda's pancake-pasted surfaces appeared on the TV monitors for the world to see for the first time. I have experienced astronomy from the chilly dome of Palomar's 18" Schmidt telescope guiding on a star to catch asteroids on a piece of film, and from the noisy interior of NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory collecting data on protostars. I have experienced astronomy from a warm room at Mauna Kea's Infrared Telescope Facility and through a 10 inch reflecting telescope at California's Joshua Tree desert. I have experienced astronomy while working through blackbody calculations at my job, while working through homework sets with my classmates, and from listening and giving planetary science presentations at conferences.
In all of these situations, my method of experiencing astronomy was by using my rational, analytical tools. Any emotions that I experienced about the beauty and wonder of the universe appeared as a secondary effect.
Fiorella Terenzi's method of guiding your experience of astronomy, in contrast, is to appeal directly to your emotions. To show you astronomy, she wishes to evoke your emotions first, then use your curiosity and thinking processes to carry you through the experience.
Now that I've had this opportunity to get to know Fiorella better and see astronomy through her eyes, I have a strong desire to sometime experience astronomy in a different way than how I currently am experiencing it. That is, to go out to a very dark field somewhere with someone close to me, bring a bottle of wine, spread out a blanket, watch the sky, and tell stories.
Dr Fiorella Terenzi Contact Information
Box 34182
Los Angeles, CA 90034 USA
email: fiorella@fiorella.com
mailing list: fans@fiorella.com
http://www.fiorella.com/
Music Orders: 1-800-71GALAXY (1-800-714-2529)
About the Author
Amara Graps is graduate student at Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany, studying interplanetary dust processes. Sometimes she also writes astronomy and scientific computing articles for trade newsletters and magazines. Amara was formerly a computational physicist consultant as well as a Stanford employee, writing image processing and helioseismic software and WWW solar education materials (Stanford, CA). Her work experience, primarily in astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary science research, was gained from work at NASA-Ames, Stanford University, the University of Colorado and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In her NASA projects, she has analyzed data from NASA's/ESA's SOHO spacecraft, NASA's Kuiper Airborne Observatory, NASA's ER-2 aircraft, the Voyager 2 spacecraft, the Pioneer Venus Orbiter spacecraft, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), the Space Shuttle's SpaceLab 2, and ground-based telescopes in Hawaii, California, and Arizona. The data includes that from the Sun, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, Comet Halley, Supernova 1987a, Venus, Mars, Io, Mercury, the Moon, Saturn's and Uranus' rings, asteroids, Earth's atmosphere, protostars, molecular clouds, galaxies, novas, main-sequence stars, and the exhaust-cloud around the Space Shuttle.
Her formal education occurred in conjunction with her jobs. She earned her B.S. in Physics in 1984 from the University of California, Irvine while she was working at JPL, and her M.S. in Physics (w/Computational Physics option) in 1991 from San Jose State University while she was associated with NASA Ames.
Graps can be reached by email: amara@amara.com; or World Wide Web: http://www.amara.com/
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