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We started by asking Josh when it was that he first became interested in Astro-viewing. He responded with the following. “I got hooked as a kid around age 10. My father was a geologist, so I grew up with an appreciation for being outside in nature. We would take day trips out to the mountains and desert East of San Diego where I grew up. Other kids would head West to the beach, but my family would always head East toward the mountains and desert.”
"I was always kind of interested in space and science, but I got truly hooked on a family trip to Bryce Canyon National Park. I got a small guide to the night sky book and just devoured it in the car on the way home. I remember it had information about amateur telescopes and telescope building which fascinated me as much as the information about the universe itself. Once I’d finished the book, I was lusting after a huge 8-inch pipe mounted Newtonian.”
Next, we asked Josh if there was anyone in particular who got him interested in astro-viewing. He stated, “my parents definitely nurtured my interest. Going so far as to help a pre-teen stick with a very long mirror making project. Taking me to a mirror grinding class every weekend that was put on by the local astronomy club. The club (the San Diego Astronomy Association) was also incredibly supportive. There were lots of members at meetings or star parties who encouraged and supported me.”
We then wanted to know what sorts of thoughts or feelings accompany Josh when he views the night sky. He went on to explain the following. “I get a real thrill from viewing, especially just the naked eye view. It is still absolutely stunning to me that life evolved in all of its myriad ways on this planet, and one of those adaptations led to a branch of bipedal mammals which had the capacity to look up at this glorious, complex view and say, “I understand.” Ok, so maybe we don’t understand every detail, but I can look up at the night sky and grasp something of my place in this universe.”
“I see the ecliptic mapped out by the planets, Sun, and Moon and that tells me the orientation of my home solar system. I watch the progression of those objects' night to night, and I understand how they are driven by my rotating plant and as we move in orbit around the sun.”
“I see the Milky Way stretching across the sky and I see how my home galaxy is oriented. I see that the Milky Way changes shape and brightness and that tells me I’m not in the center, but out in the arms. Furthermore, my view of the galaxy changes depending on the season. I can see the bright dramatic center in the summer and the fainter outer portions in winter and that gives me my orientation within the galaxy.”
“I see the faint smudge of Andromeda (or even the fainter mist of M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, on exceptional nights) and I can see how my home galaxy sits in this local group of galaxies.”
“I can see how the stars are distributed on the night sky and can understand how recent, very local bursts of star formation have produced the bright groupings of stars such as that toward Sagittarius and Scorpius. I see the dark patches and lanes in the Milky Way and know that’s where new stars are being born.”
“It is wild to me that we can grasp something so enormously complex and beautiful as the night sky and we can use what we see to map out our place in the universe. Other people sometimes say this makes them feel small. I can definitely see that, but it makes me feel incredibly special at the same time. It is conceivable we are the only intelligent beings out there (certainly as far as we know for now). For me, that makes those moments of contemplation and understanding incredibly meaningful. Would the universe be as remarkable if there were no one to appreciate it? I don’t think it would be and that makes us incredibly significant on the scale of the universe.”
Another question we asked Josh was, what celestial objects or bodies that stood out to him from his time spent observing the night sky and which one is your favorite? He answered saying “I’m weirdly a fan of Mars. I say weirdly because I don't really know much about it, I’m not full of trivia about all the various places on Mars. Honestly, I’m hard pressed to identify named surface features other than one or two big ones, even with a map, but I absolutely love watching the surface. I think this is because Mars, more than any other object in the night sky, is another world and yet it is also familiar. One can imagine being there. Sure, you can see more details on the surface of the Moon, but it is stark, airless, and somehow uninviting. Mars has polar ice caps, mountains, valleys and clouds. It has weather! Somehow being just that little bit familiar makes it endlessly fascinating to me.
We went on to ask Josh who some of his favorite astro-viewers are. He told us that his favorite astronomer was most likely E. E. Barnard. “I’m a bit biased because in graduate school, I did my dissertation on star formation. I looked at large scales (entire molecular clouds), rather than at the details of individual young stars, but that forced me to look at the “big picture” and it was genuinely useful to look at those old wide field images from either the Palomar Sky Survey or Barnard’s early photographic images. His work was really foundational in helping us understand what the naked eye sky was: that the dark areas in the Milky Way were entirely new objects, not just a lack of stars. His dedication, especially to the technical side of the craft, is also impressive. He had the tenacity to take single exposures which were the length of an entire night, and in some cases longer than one night - - shuttering the exposure during the day, then re-acquiring the same guide star the next night and re-opening the shutter on the same glass plate.
When we asked Josh what his first telescope ever was and how he obtained it, he responded with the following explanation. “I had the usual "department store refractor" which was enough to give me a taste of astronomy. Fortunately, because I'd already absorbed a book or two by then, I knew not to let its limitations end my interest. Honestly, I managed well with it for a while, but my first "real" telescope was a Celestron C4.5 Newtonian on a Polaris mount. My parents bought it for me of course.”
We also wanted to know when Josh first discovered Stellarvue Telescopes and how that has made a difference for him. He stated “I can’t remember exactly how I first learned about Stellarvue, probably from an ad in Sky and Telescope or something like that. I was fully in my aperture fever phase (something I’ve thankfully grown out of), but I decided I wanted a small grab and go telescope as well. I did an obsessive amount of research and ended up buying an AT1010 from Vic and landed in the online SV User Group. I’ve been in the SV family, so to speak, ever since.” Josh now owns an SVX152T which he enjoys using to observe in his spare time.
For our next question we asked Josh if his knowledge and experience with astro-viewing has taken a longtime to build-up. He responded by saying “it takes a while to fully absorb all aspects of the sky and of the equipment in astronomy. For example, it was literally years before I really learned how to make the best use of that C4.5 telescope I had as a kid. For a long time, I used it without ever polar aligning the mount, just steering the telescope in whatever orientation the mount happened to land when I set up. I also remember returning home from college one year and taking it out in the backyard and while collimating it, I realized (for the first time), that the secondary was undersized, and it probably was more like a 3.5-inch reflector in practice.”
We then asked Josh what advice he would give to up and comers pursuing astro-viewing. He shared the following words of wisdom. “Enjoy being out under the sky independent of your equipment. There are observing sessions where I devote hours to the drive to and from the site, plus setup and tear down time for the equipment, and I probably spend less than half the time there looking in the eyepiece or even interacting with the telescope. Instead, I just enjoy the naked eye view and the feeling of being out in the universe.”
To wrap up our interview with Josh, we asked him if there was anything else he wanted to share about or related to his astro-viewing journey. He gave us the following synopsis on some of his work at the W. M. Keck Observatory, since the last time we talked to him. “In the last interview I did, I talked a bit about working at the Keck Observatory. One change since then which has had a big impact on me, is that we took delivery of a new instrument. That's a big deal. The telescope does the job of collecting the light, but as a scientist, an astronomer is most interested in making some sort of measurement and it is the instrument attached to the telescope which enables those measurements. For example, a simple camera attached to the telescope can let you measure position (where stars are relative to one another) or brightness. Most of the instruments at Keck work primarily as spectrographs. They split up the light from the object(s) of interest, into their component wavelengths and allow the astronomer to make all sorts of measurements about the object being studied.”
“Our newest instrument is a high resolution, visible wavelength spectrograph designed specifically to measure the small wobble induced in a star by the planets going around it. The Keck Planet Finder (KPF) is the most advanced instrument of its kind. This is an extraordinarily challenging measurement to do at the precision levels required to detect Earth-like planets which is one of the goals. I am the "Instrument Scientist" for KPF at Keck which meant I was responsible for bringing it online here at the observatory after it was built at Berkeley by a team of scientists and engineers primarily from Caltech, JPL, Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz. Although my science background is in star formation, I've immersed myself in this world of exoplanets and "precision radial velocity" measurements and am enjoying all of the technical challenges of making this machine a productive, scientific tool. It will take years to detect the small wobble of Earth-like planets in orbit around Sun-like stars (because we have to watch for at least an orbit or two), so I expect to be spending most of my time caring for and optimizing this instrument over the coming few years.”
This is incredibly important and fascinating work that Josh is taking part in. We were excited to hear from him again and are deeply inspired by his experience as a visual user, an astro-physicist and a well-rounded astronomer. We hope our readers enjoyed his story as it is not every day that we get to hear from someone in his line of work, with such humble beginnings.
Learn more about the W. M. Keck Observatory and the exciting work they do:
W. M. Keck Observatory – Exploring the universe from the one of the largest, most scientifically productive telescopes on Earth.
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