Who am I?

I gave up the title to my perennial bachelorhood: The happy day was the 27th of May, 1995. My wife Marcella and I were hitched in Cunningham, Kansas, on her parents' farm. The weather was gorgeous, but could not hold a candle to my lovely bride. I of course looked smashing as well. We wasted no time starting a family, and our daughter Zoe was born in March the following year.

I only have one picture from the wedding scanned in, and I stole it from Rob Spiker. It is a scene from nearby Pratt, Kansas . Those folks have a funny sense of humor; but this isn't surprising considering they keep electing Bob Dole to the Senate. [note added 11/4/98: Nuts. When I redid the website that picture got shrunk quite a bit. The towers are marked `hot' and `cold'. ;-) ] I also found that Pratt has its own web page.

On Friday, August 26th 1994, at 2:00, I successfully defended my PhD. The committee (including my advisor, Roger Chevalier) deliberated for 15 minutes, during which time I found 73 reasons for them to fail me. They thought otherwise, and so the party started an hour later. At that party, I caught the worst poison ivy I ever hope to get. Serves me right for getting a higher education.

My PhD thesis was published in The Astrophysical Journal on February 1, 1995. If you want to read it, and I cannot really imagine why, there is a version of it online. I'll warn you, it's big, even for a journal article. For a shorter version, the abstract is available on the Astrophysics Data System here.

As if graduating (after 13 years of college) were not enough, I also got a job! I worked on data from COBE, the COsmic Background Explorer, to look at infrared light from the beginning of the universe. The problem was, dust and junk in our own solar system glows brightly and swamps the light from the Universe, so I was hired to try to help calibrate one of the instruments on COBE to figure all this out.

However, I decided for any number of reasons (the biggest one being my boss) that I needed a new job, so I found another one.

In 1995, I started work on STIS, or the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. This is a new camera that was launched via Space Shuttle and installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in 1996, in a series of procedures much like when the HST was refurbished back in 1994. This device produces terabytes of information, and I was to calibrate them. I was also lucky enough to do some independent research and support the research of many other astronomers. I was involved with many interesting projects, including taken images of stars being born, stars dying, galaxies, quasars, black holes, asteroids and a number of other things.

My email address at that job was plait@colossus.gsfc.nasa.gov. I named my computer after one that took over the world in one of my favorite movies, ``Colossus: The Forbin Project''.

Currently (starting December 2000) I am gainfully employed by the Sonoma State University department of physics and astronomy, working on web-based public outreach for a satellite named GLAST. Please see my ``Who Is the Bad Astronomer'' webpage for details.

Please note that I am *not* a direct NASA employee, and so anything I say is not necessarily the opinion of NASA or its contractors or even of me.

Where I am in the analog world...

work:

Sonoma State University

Department of Physics and Astronomy

1801 E. Cotati Avenue

Rohnert Park, CA 94928

work phone: (707) 664-2190

...or in the digital one

badastro@badastronomy.com