In the previous entry for December 4, I talked some about my latest book, Visions of the Cosmos, but actually it’s not just MY book. It’s a project that my co-author, Jack Brandt, and I undertook starting about two or three years ago. I get the question a lot about how I ended up partnering with Jack Brandt on books. It’s a long story, but here’s the executive summary. Way back when I decided to go back to school to study astronomy and suchlike stuff, I needed to find a job that was a bit less demanding than lecturing at the planetarium. So I applied for a job with a group called the International Halley Watch, involving measuring plasma tail characteristics captured in images of Comet Halley. The head of the group at CU was a guy named John Brandt, whom I’d never heard of, but I was told he was a good fellow.

The day of the interview we talked for a few minutes about the work and then another hour about mutual acquaintances and experiences. A couple of days later, he wrote me an email inviting me to join his team. Little did I know at the time that I’d just lucked into a major friendship and partnership that continues to this day. Jack is pretty amazing — he’s one of those people who has been there and done that and has amusing stories to tell about all of it. Among his varied academic and work experiences, he studied under Subramanian Chandrasekhar at the University of Chicago, was a grad student along with Carl Sagan, spent some time teaching at Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland, was a lab chief at Goddard, led the Hubble Space Telescope’s Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph team, and many other career moves that I found out about as I worked for him from 1988 through the end of 1996. It was a rewarding eight years and a period of my life that I enjoyed very much (and that I found challenging and stimulating).

In the early 1990s, just as I began my graduate work at CU (with much encouragement from Jack), I started working on Hubble Vision. At first Jack was my science advisor and fact-checker, but as time went by I realized he was offering much more than an advisor would do, so I asked him to be my co-author. He agreed so quickly I knew it was the right move. Ultimately, we went through two editions of that book and ended up authoring and editing several other papers and a conference proceedings together, too. While we wrote Hubble Vision during our tenure at the University of Colorado, our latest partnership, on Visions of the Cosmos, required us to communicate through email and telephone between Massachusetts (where I moved in 1997) and New Mexico (where he retired a couple of years later) — rather than by the almost daily contact we had during the time I worked for him at CU. Now, after several years of this strange long-distance partnership, we’ve managed to crank out another book (see my previous entry), we’re still talking to each other, and I’d like to think we’ve turned out a good book together. Or at least, that great minds think alike!

Jack taught me a great many things, not always in the classroom or during our bouts of research. For instance, before I met him I had never drunk Watney’s Cream Stout. I didn’t know much about red wine. I hadn’t been to too many baseball games. And, before he had me working for him, I doubt Jack had been too cognizant of such things as planetarium shows, space music, and good Mexican food. Of such things are friendships made — and they continue. Jack and his lovely wife Dorothy have hosted us in their New Mexico home several times (and before that in their Colorado home), and they’ve come to visit us in Massachusetts a few times. This past October, Mark and I met up with them in Miami for a Jazz Cruise through the Caribbean. It was a wonderful way to celebrate the completion of our latest book project, Dorothy’s birthday, and the occasion of Mark and my 25th wedding anniversary.

So, the next question is, will Jack and I do another book together soon? Anything could happen… 😉 We’ll keep everybody posted!