UW professor and astronomer Emily Leveque
has been wowed by the Stars ever since.
She was a little girl growing up in Seattle.
In her new book The Last Star gazers,
Emily gives us a behind the
scenes look at what life is like
as a professional astronomer.
You know a lot of us look up
at the sky and we marvel at
the stars and the vastness.
But what inspired you to
make this your career?
I actually fell in love with
the stars when I was really
little when I was two years old.
Haley's Comet actually made
a very close pass by Earth,
so we could all see it with the naked eye,
and I remember my whole family
tramping out into our backyard in
Massachusetts to have a look at it.
I was a toddler. I was fussy.
I was tired.
I was scared of the dark until they
pointed me up and I was then so
mesmerized by what I was looking at
and from then on people would ask me
what I wanted to be when I grew up.
And it was.
Well, I want to be a ballerina or
an astronomer or a firefighter
or an astronomer and astronomer
stuck in here I am.
I mean what a magnificent thing
to be and to follow that dream.
And I don't know that a lot of
folks know what astronomers do what.
What are some misconceptions
about your career?
This is the main reason that I wrote my book.
The last stargazers is I wanted to give
people this behind the scenes view of
what life is in astronomer is like.
I interviewed more than 100 of
my colleagues for this book.
I mainly just let them tell me their stories,
but I asked everyone what's the
biggest misunderstanding of what we
do and a lot of the answers were.
People think we still look through eyepiece.
Is they think we tend to go to a telescope,
peer through it and just sort of say
well what's happening in the sky
tonight and it makes sense because
that's how so many of us started.
Stargazing we would use a backyard
telescope or go to an astronomy
open house and we're used to looking
at the sky with our eyes.
Nowadays we have amazing cameras and
scientific instruments on the back of
telescopes that are building sized.
So we look at a lot of our data on
a computer screen but it doesn't
make it any less exciting.
It just means the nuts and bolts
of how we work or that different.
What are some of the craziest
places you've been for your job?
Have you been to the SETI Institute?
So, the craziest place I've been for my job.
I've never gotten the chance to visit.
SETI Institute always 18
such fascinating work.
Looking at this question of you
know are we alone? Is there life?
Is there intelligent life
elsewhere in the universe?
I think the coolest thing that I've done
for my research is flown on a airplane
with its door open over Antarctica so.
It's pretty wild.
I tell this story in my book,
but NASA actually has a telescope
that they fly in the back of a
special Boeing 747 that's built
so that it can open its door
while flying in the stratosphere.
So by getting that high we get above a
lot of the water vapor in our atmosphere,
and it means we can see types of light
that you can't see from the ground,
so it's a great place to put a telescope.
But astronomers have the chance to fly
on board the telescope and actually.
Be on the plane during these observations,
I write the full story of how
this came to be in my book,
because it's a bit of an adventure,
but it's the coolest thing I've
ever gotten to do for my job.
Of
course, now I have a follow
up question. Do you believe
there is life on other planets?
So there is a whole institute here at
the University of Washington called the
Astro Biology Institute and Astro Biology.
Sounds like a made up or science fiction
word, and it's a real and serious
science where we try to study what
other planets are there out there?
Could they host life like what
we have on Earth? Could they host
a very different type of life?
I think that in such a huge
universe with so many planets,
it's inevitable that there's going
to be life somewhere and it's just
a matter of doing this sort of
astrobiology research to try and find
it. Statistically speaking,
I mean you you kind of wonder
so in writing your book,
why did you decide to write about
the human sign of astronomy to
give us the behind the scenes of
the people behind the telescopes?
I think this is a perspective
that is really valuable to take
when we talk about science.
Everybody loves space.
Everybody loves the cool Hubble
pictures that we wind up taking.
You see, you know these sparkling galaxies,
or colorful nebulae,
and we can do an all over them.
But we don't really know the story
behind where those pictures come from.
And the people who take them.
And I know when I was a little kid and
interested in becoming an astronomer,
nobody had to sell me on space,
but I didn't really know what
my job was going to be all day.
I didn't know if I would
be permanently nocturnal.
I'm just working at a telescope
every night and in reality we
go to telescopes once in awhile,
but we spend a lot of time
working on data at our computers.
I wanted to give people this
glimpse into a really unusual
scientific field and a field
that's changing really rapidly as
technology contributes to what we do.
So I wanted to preserve the human stories.
Kind of put a human face on science.
I think it's easy to think of
scientists as these like remote,
inaccessible people who do nothing
but think about science all day.
And there's so many familiar human
sort of quirks and adventures in
this book that we all run into
as part of doing our jobs.
But I think will be familiar to people,
even if they're not scientists,
and I wanted to put that human
connection into our field.
How cool is she?
Well, she Emily is signing copies
of her book tonight at Otis
Technical Books on Capitol Hill.
There will of course, be plenty of
time for Q&A with the audience as well.
For more details,
head to the new day website.