I'm a science writer and editor. I work with clients in the observatory and planetarium community, as well as my own book, web, planetarium, and other projects.
Need a writer/editor? Visit my services page for my projects and availability.
Note: The ads you see below and at the bottom of this page are screened for content and many fine companies do appear here. Occasionally ads I don't want DO slip through, particularly for pseudo-science, st*r-naming, ID, and other questionable sites. Please understand that I cannot be held responsible for their content. Do visit them if you wish, but as with all advertising, be logical and use common sense.
Well, another little travel break took me out to Gemini Observatory in Hawai'i for a few days of meetings. Then, back to California, where I finally had a chance to show my folks around the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
I like to work with observatories; have been doing it now for a few years. Most of the work I do is in public outreach, helping the astronomers get the message out about the work they do in their domes. Gemini has been a steady client since 2004, and Griffith hired me to write their exhibits in 2005-2006.
The work is endlessly fascinating. Just as an example, there's a press release out from Gemini Observatory about an odd little star that has a surprisingly active magnetic field. You can read more about it here. I started working on that press release in early autumn this year. The first step was to interview the scientist who headed the research team studying the star. We talked by phone a couple of times, and I did some background reading so that I could weave in some ideas about how stellar magnetic fields are generated. That way, we could make the case for why this star is so unusual.
The next step was to send the first draft of the press release to the folks at Gemini for their review, as well as to the scientist. It went through the review process, and the folks at Gemini then commissioned some space art to illustrate the star.
When I was in Hawai'i, I finished my part of the work, and from there it went to final review before today's publication date. That's a pretty typical creation/review process, and while I don't always write the press releases, I do get in on the review and editing process at some point. Along the way, I get to add to my store of astronomy knowledge, which is a constantly changing treasury.
Writing exhibits is quite a bit different; they reach out to a hugely wider audience than a press release, and each panel in an exhibit tells a story of its own. I was quite happy to show my folks and mother-in-law around Griffith, and was curious to see what they'd take away from what they saw. To my great delight, they got exactly what I'd hoped they'd get out of the visit, asking the questions we'd hoped to spur with our work. Plus, it was hugely satisfying to show off what amounts to the equivalent of a giant book spread out across tens of thousands of square feet of exhibit space!
TheSpacewriter, her folks, and Albert Einstein, at Griffith Observatory.
As long-time readers know, I write about astronomy and space science in a variety of formats. Of course there are the books and magazine articles, this blog, and the Griffith Observatory exhibits, which I wrote during 2005 and well into 2006. And, in the very near future, I'll be debuting some short video documentaries online for a group of scientists at an observatory near my office.
I also do documentary scripts, mostly for planetariums. That is what I'm best known for among the world's several thousand planetarium professionals. Sometimes in the course of my work, I find myself telling somebody about the planetarium shows I've written. Yep, there have been several dozen of them over the years, and they're something of a unique art form. Mostly this is because the show's action takes place projected on the domed ceiling of a round room. It's a different kind of medium than the big squares/rectangles you see at your local movie houses or in your living room. For one thing, stuff can't go "off screen" or "exit stage left" as you would see in a movie, TV show or in a live play. There's no "off" or "left" in a hemisphere. Oh, you can have stuff go "down" (that is, below the level of the dome") and that's legitimate. Another difference lies in the immersiveness of the dome. You can literally put your audience into a scene, which immediately affects the types and speeds of motion you can use on the dome. There's a lot of experimentation going on these days with just what you can get away with on the dome before you make your audience sick or lose their interest or just simply overwhelm them with the show. And that experimentation has been brought on largely by the advent of fulldome video systems.
Planetarium shows are a hybrid of documentary and immersive entertainment. In the planetarium community, there's always some ferment over how much something is educational versus entertaining, but that debate lacks the teeth it used to have. For one thing, educational programs can be entertaining, given the right mixture of talent and skill among the creators. In the beginning, back before there were slide projectors and video projectors, planetarium folk had a round room with a star projector. They used this space to give lectures, pointing out the various stars and constellations. Before long, somebody thought of adding some music to enhance the mood of the lecture. Then somebody else thought of sticking some slide projectors in the room to show pictures from telescopes, spacecraft, space artists, and other sources. Eventually, planetarium shows divided into "live" vs "taped" presentations, and there were great fermenting hullabaloos over which was better. Turns out that each kind of presentation had/has its strengths, and the wise planetarium person uses them both as appropriate.
Today, the fulldome video presentation is the digital child of the old slide-tape format show. Technology has progressed well enough that you can stretch several hundred to several thousand pixels across a dome. Naturally, all of us who produce shows are embracing this as a way to do ever-better and more exciting shows.
This hasn't changed my scriptwriting goals too much, other than now I can add "documentary fulldome video writer" to my list of marketable skills. And, like everybody else in the planetarium community who is going or has gone to fulldome video (either with or without the accompanying opto-mechanical star projector), I'm having to learn some new skills (video editing and compositing, for one). Planetarium shows have come a long way since the first one I did, which was a slide-tape show about the speed of light. I wonder where they'll go in the future?
Here's a pet peeve of mine, but with a little background. I read a lot of science press releases each week, and many more science stories from various online (and tree-based) sources. At least one (and usually more) of those sources winds up saying something like, "Scientists believe that... " in an effort to get across the idea that the scientists are describing a discovery or knowledge they have about a given topic of research.
What bugs me about that usage is that it isn't correct, particularly when it gets applied to some facts that scientists (doctors, physicists, chemists, biologists, etc.) are trying to get across to the public. The writer should have said, "Scientists think... " or "Scientists know... " or something that indicates definite knowledge, not hopeful belief. (Unless, of course the scientist in question says, "We believe we can find the cure for cancer in this generation." That IS a correct usage.)
What bugs me about "believe" vs. "think"? It's sloppy language usage. Here's the Dictionary.com definition for believe: "to have confidence in the truth, the existence, or the reliability of something, although without absolute proof that one is right in doing so: Only if one believes in something can one act purposefully." (Italics mine.)
Here's the definition for think: "to have a conscious mind, to some extent of reasoning, remembering experiences, making rational decisions, etc.; to employ one's mind rationally and objectively in evaluating or dealing with a given situation."
Using the word "believe" puts in an element of uncertainty that often is at direct odds with what the scientist actually said or has discovered. Using "think" or "know" expertly expresses exactly what the data support. Let's explore that a bit.
Let's say that a planetary scientist discovers a new planet in the outer solar system. That discovery is written up in a press release and the scientist says, "We know from our spectra that the surface of this world is made up largely of water ice." It's absolute fact, he or she knows it, and after we read the story, we know it. We can look at the spectra and the data is right there, telling us that the surface has water ice on it.
Yet, often enough, I'll see the news stories based on the press release (and even interviews with the scientist), and somewhere in the story, the reporter writes, "The scientists believe that there's water ice on the surface of this new world." (Or something like that.)
No. No. No. There's no "belief" about it. It's a fact. Go back up and read that definition of "believe" again and think about it. Saying "believe" is simply the wrong language to describe a scientific certainty. Now, if you wanted to say something like "Bobby believed that the Big Dipper was his favorite constellation" or "The Elbonians believed in the myth of Atlantis" that would be entirely proper because then there IS confidence in some truth or reliability of some information but there's no data or proof of the stated belief.
It's a fine point, but one that we should all pay more attention to, because science does deal in precise language and measurements. "Belief" is not part of the scientific process, but having factual knowledge is.
Or here's another way to think of it. I'm a science writer, I have a degree in journalism, I work as a freelance editor, and I have experience working at at a magazine and a newspaper. Therefore I know something of how these professions work. It is entirely right for me to say, "I know that newspapers work on deadlines" because I experienced it and it goes on to this day. I also know from my experience that editors change stories that reporters turn in for publication (or that they get from press releases). They do this for many reasons, but usually to tighten them up or replace repeated words, or to clarify something.
For example, a writer that I once edited used the word "that" as much as possible. However, it gets tiresome to see the same word over and over again, so as an editor, I looked for words to replace "that" to help the meaning along. So, if I see a story where the word "believe" is substituted for the words "think" or "know" when referring to something that scientists DO think and DO know, I would be absolutely correct in saying, "I believe that the editor substituted the word "believe" for the word "know" because the writer may have used the word "know" too many times." I could also just as easily say "I believe the writer used the word "believe" because he or she didn't know better."
I can't say that I "think" the editor or the writer did it because that would imply that I have direct knowledge of what that editor or writer did. But, I can say that I "believe" it happened, because while I don't have direct knowledge, I do have a pretty high confidence level that it happened.
Pedantic, yes. Correct, yes. Science writing demands as much precision as the subject we're writing about. I don't believe that. I KNOW it.
Back in August, 1981 I took a trip out to California to be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to watch and learn as the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Saturn (and various moons and rings). It was a pretty major event in my life; it's what turned me toward a life of science writing. I was working at The Denver Post at the time, and had talked the managing editor into letting me go out and cover the event (even though I was a newly fledged editorial assistant at the time). I think I must have told him that I'd represent the paper well, because he handed me an accreditation letter, patted my hand (which was sort of the editorial equivalent of chucking me under the chin, I guess), and told me to go out and have a good time.
A week or so later, I landed in Los Angeles, and proceeded to have the time of my life. JPL was sort of a "Holy Grail" site for me. I remembered reading about it during the Moon and Mars missions, so I couldn't wait to get there and start watching planetary scientists in action.
So, there I was at JPL's von Karman Auditorium and press site, with a desk and phone and press credentials, watching as folks like Carl Sagan (one of the people who showed me that science writing could be fun) would walk by, visiting with the press or talking with fellow scientists about what they'd seen so far.
Many of the press folk attending the week's press conferences were experienced science reporters. A few, like Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope, the folks from Astronomy Magazine, myself, and others, had some astronomy and/or planetary science background. In fact, some were SO experienced that they could make some initial science diagnoses about the pictures at about the same time the scientists themselves were figuring just what the heck we were seeing in the images. The image interpretations (called "instant science") were flowing freely, and the many successful press attempts to figure out the images led one scientist to dub the science press as the "von Karman imaging team" as a sort of tribute to our interest and expertise.
One of the most enduring memories I have of that week (and there are many!) is the evening that images from the moon Enceladus were due to come in. It also happened to be the night that Ted Koppel was going to broadcast "Nightline" live from the von Karman Auditorium at JPL. The press rooms were crawling with several hundred print and TV journalists from around the world, and most of them worked diligently during the day to get their stories filed by late afternoon. By evening all of us who weren't on TV would sit around and watch the TV folks from the east coast do their standups and live interviews. That is, when we weren't glued to the closed-circuit TVs around the place that showed a constant stream of images from Voyager 2.
Anyway, that night, we were watching as Ted put on his makeup and his entourage of directors and camera people bustled around getting things set up. Just as Ted and the bunch were about to go live with their broadcast, images of Enceladus started streaming onto the monitors. Immediately we were all drawn to them, and a bunch of us were clustered around one of the monitors (the von Karman imaging team AND Voyager imaging scientists who happened to be nearby) arguing over just what the strange markings on the moon's surface could mean. It was a free-for-all of image interpretation, planetary science "jousting" and pure astonishment at the amazing level of detail we could make out in the images. I remember standing next to Brad Smith, who was one of the Voyager planetary science team members, listening to him describe the processes that could have formed those strange cracks on the surface.
Well, we'd pretty much forgotten about the "Nightline" folks in our frenzy to look at the images. Not that they cared about us print folks. But, they DID care about having a quiet set, and apparently we were interfering pretty badly with Ted's opening monologue. One of his assistants came over, huffy and waving papers and hissing at us to keep it down.
We did, for awhile. But, as the pictures kept streaming down, our excited discussions got pretty loud again. At one point, Ted chuckled and said that the excitement level was quite high, one of the major understatements in the history of press conferences.
It's amazing to realize that 26 years have gone by since that wonderful, exciting week. I, of course, haven't aged a bit, although my science writing has steadily improved over the years. That visit to JPL is, as I said, what launched me as "TheSpacewriter" (although, at the time, I wasn't quite so audacious as to call myself that), and eventually sparked my interest in going back to school to study more astronomy and planetary science. And, another degree, a couple of major science research projects, some books, a magazine editorship, a bunch of planetarium shows and documentaries, a major science exhibit project, an upcoming vodcast series, and countless other projects later, here I am looking back with great fondness on the mission that set me on my way. So, here's a tip of the ol' scan platform to Voyager 2 and the planet Saturn for being there at the beginning of my own trajectory into astronomy and planetary science!
We are lucky to live in a time when images of the cosmos are pouring in from various telescopes (both on and OFF Earth) at a prodigious rate. Every day I can check upwards of a dozen or so websites where the "latest from space" shows up in full, glorious color; everything from pictures of Mars to images of the most distant galaxies in the cosmos.
Sometimes data about distant objects isn't even in picture form, but looks more like a graph. It's still important information, but not quite so photogenic as a picture. And, like it or not, humans are still enticed more by a pretty picture than a graph, even if the graph is like the one below, telling us something really exciting about the discovery of geyser-like plumes on Charon, a companion world to distant Pluto. Since the general reader might not pick up on the "excitement" just by looking at a graph of data, it's often up to science writers and scientists who bring the story alive.
The spectrum of Charon obtained by NIRI at Gemini North. It is centered at 2.2 microns for the sub-Pluto (top) and anti-Pluto (bottom) hemispheres of Charon. The solid line denotes the best fit for a model of a surface with ammonia hydrate and water ices. The dashed lines are data that indicate the position of the ammonia hydrate feature. The sub-Pluto and anti-Pluto ammonia hydrate minima are located at 2.2131 and 2.1995, respectively. (The error bars represent 1 sigma.). (Spectrum by Jason Cook.)
A few weeks ago I was working on a press release for Gemini Observatory about Charon. We got the graph above from the scientist who had done the observations, which were made using a special infrared-sensitive imager/spectrograph and adaptive optics at the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i. It's an important piece of science, but we knew we needed a pretty picture to bring the story home to readers who don't know a lot about spectroscopy or infrared imaging. So, I worked on a mockup of what I thought Charon would look like if it had geyser-type formations spewing water ice across the surface. Planetary scientists have a term for this kind of action: cryovolcanism.
Even though this was the first time that cryovolcanism had been "seen" on Charon, I knew from past experience with other icy worlds (and comets) about what it should look like. Ultimately, using worlds created for Seeker3D by Software Bisque, a DigitalSky starfield from Sky-Skan, Inc. plus some Adobe Photoshop® wizardry by Mark Petersen (and a little additional Photoshop® work of my own), I created a composite scene of what I thought the Charon cryovolcanism action would look like, and sent it off to the folks at Gemini to use with the press release and subsequent story/caption.
An artist’s conception of Charon (with Pluto in the background) against the backdrop of the Milky Way. The plumes and brighter spots depicted at left on Charon are thought to be created as water (with some ammonia hydrate mixed in) “erupts” from deep beneath the surface. The material sprays out through cracks in the icy crust, immediately freezes and snows crystalline ice down onto the surface, creating a water-ammonia hydrate ice field. Such fields were detected and studied using the near-infrared imager on Gemini North. (This composite image includes Pluto and Charon models (enhanced), courtesy of Software Bisque. www.seeker3d.com, with plumes and ice fields added by Mark C. Petersen, Loch Ness Productions. Star field from DigitalSky 2, courtesy Sky-Skan, Inc.)
Coupled with the graphed data, the subsequent story (which you can read here) gives every kind of reader something to grasp in this story of exploration of our outer solar system.
Having gone through the process of image creation (along with the writing of the press release (with valuable input from astronomers Jason Cook, Scott Fisher, Steven Desch, and Tom Geballe)), I appreciated once again the power of the written word coupled with strong illustrations that tell both a scientific and visual story. Judging by the number of places that picked up the story and image and ran with it, I'd guess all of us who worked on this story succeeded in bringing that story home!
One of the things I do is help scientists describe their work to the public. Sometimes this means writing a press release or reading over an article someone has written for a publication. Whatever it is, my job is to find the most important parts of the story and bring them forward so that the scientist and the public (reporters, usually) can have a meaningful discussion about the work. That's not always easy, since there are stark differences in the way scientists write up their work for their peers and the way they might tell their story to the public. You can chalk those differences up to the rigors of scientific publishing, where the methods of doing a science experiment are as an important part of the story as the results.
Every discipline in science has its jargon, its ways of communicating among the participants. For example, if you go to the doctor and have an examination of your right side above your waistline, your doctor might write up that the examination centered on the abdominal RUQ. Jargon, to be sure, but it's a shorthand that describes exactly what was examined. Or, let's say you go to a talk about the early universe, as given by one astronomer to a group of colleagues. You might hear the following: "We're using long-period gamma-ray bursts as a probe of the intergalactic medium neutral fraction at z=6.3."
Translated, that means that they're looking for long-period gamma-ray bursts (longer than a few seconds, typically), which scientists think happen when a huge star explodes and emits a jet, or when a white dwarf star merges with either a neutron star or a black hole. The action emits a huge burst of radiation, which speeds across the universe. As it goes along, it passes through clouds of gas, clouds of gas and dust, and through clusters and possibly other galaxies. As it does, that radiation (light) is absorbed by whatever is in the way. You can see that absorption when you study the light with special instruments called spectrographs. The results tell you the chemical makeup of any clouds of cold gas, or gas and dust in the space between galaxies back in the early universe (more than about 9 billion years ago). So, in that one sentence, the scientist says a lot, but it's buried in specialized language.
In a science paper, the typical form is to describe (briefly) a finding, and then go into details about how that finding was made (equipment, constraints, etc.), and then go into the details of the finding. Often this means that the "news" of a paper is buried IN the paper, and not up in the first few sentences, as you'd see in a newspaper story. This is perfectly normal and nothing to be worried about—unless you're also trying to explain the "newsworthy" part of a science discovery to the public. Then you have to find the "meat" of the story, and lead with it in the first few sentences. So, a story about the gamma-ray bursters might read like this if you saw it in the paper: "Scientists at Gemini Observatory are using the 8-meter telescope to peer back about 9 billion years to study bright flashes of light called gamma-ray bursters. The light, which passes through clouds of gas and dust on its way across the universe, can tell astronomers the makeup of that gas and dust, as well as how quickly it's moving."
That's my job—to identify the news in a story and help tell that story. I might do it for a press release or a newspaper article or a magazine article, or (my favorite) for a planetarium show or documentary.
So, a few weeks ago I was talking to a scientist who studies the effects of space weather on our communications systems. Spaceweather (which you can learn more about here, and here, and most especially here) is basically a catch-all term for interactions between material that has been belched out from the Sun and our planet's magnetic field and upper atmosphere. Auroral displays (northern and southern lights) are the most obvious manifestation of space weather that we can see.
Aurora on April 1, 2007, over New Aiyansh, British Columbia. Taken by Yuichi Takasaka. Courtesy Spaceweather.com.
There's another side to space weather, however. A strong event can knock out telecommunications systems, power grids, and GPS satellite service. This last is important because we depend on GPS timing signals for an incredible number of things in our daily lives.
So, back to the scientist. She was asked to give a presentation at last week's Spaceweather Enterprise Forum in Washington, D.C. She came to me for advice on how to identify some strong talking points for her presentation. So, we set to work on her statement. The science is very compelling, very straightforward: spaceweather can harm GPS systems. We need to know that and construct backup systems as well as harden the systems we have. Otherwise a strong solar burst could knock out more than just communications. I asked her for some examples of what GPS effects are in our daily lives. She mentioned a few, including one I hadn't thought about: financial transactions. Bank transfers depend on accurate timing from GPS. So, I said to her that this was a point that would grab people right in the wallet. To me it was a point that would grab the attention of bottom-liners in business as well as government. So, I suggested that she make that one of her talking points.
We quickly came up with a few more talking points, such as how we can't predict when large solar outbursts are going to take place. We were totally surprised by one last December that partially shut down GPS systems for (as she put it) tens of minutes. That's a long time in communications and financial circles.
We honed her statement down and off she went to the meeting. And, lo and behold, her statements got picked up by nearly every news agency in attendance. Even though she was the last speaker on the podium, she got maximum "sound bite" out of a simple truth: space weather can and does affect things on this planet. (If you're interested in what she had to say, go here and click on the link for Anthea Coster of MIT's Haystack Observatory. Heck, listen to all of them!)
It's a lot of fun being a space writer and doing what I do. Sometimes it gets me in on a story before it hits the news!
The sites below belong to space and astronomy enthusiasts. I make every effort to check them and make sure they are still appropriate. However, I am not responsible for their content, nor do I endorse any of it by simply linking to them. As with all Web surfing, please exercise caution.
Adot's Notblog A fellow traveler blogger and astronomy enthusiast!
Astronomy Blog An astronomy blog pondering the big questions
