TNSP07 Speakers

Wesley R. Swift

Wesley R. Swift earned his BS (mathematics) and MS (physics) degrees from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1986 and 1990. He was employed by the Optical Aeronomy Laboratory at UAH 1986 - 2001 and specialized in ground based and space based airglow instrumentation and software for NASA and NSF. Past NASA projects include the balloon born Imaging Stratospheric Ultraviolet Spectrometer (ISUS), the Imaging Spectrometric Observatory (ISO), used in both ground based and ATLAS I modes, the Ultra Violet Imager (UVI) on the POLAR satellite, and a day/night CCD star tracking camera and auto guider for a NASA X-ray balloon telescope. For the NSF, he operated the ISO at McDonald Observatory in twilight and nightglow modes and designed, built and developed the software for the Optimized Airglow Spectrometric Imaging System (OASIS). His involvement with the UVI included observation and analysis of images, on orbit recalibration, star pointing platform analysis. He is presently employed by Raytheon supporting the Space Environments Office at NASA / MSFC. There projects include harvesting space weather data from hundreds of satellites, video photometry development, Columbia crash investigation, and video meteor analysis software development. He is currently involved with the Meteoroid Environments office developing methods for monitoring lunar meteoroid impacts, hypervelocity impact testing, and has recently built the MSFC Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory (ALaMO) and is building the remotely operated Walker County (Georgia) Observatory for lunar impact verification. He is the Observatory Director of the Von Braun Astronomical Society in Huntsville, AL.

Dr. David A. Weintraub

Is Pluto a Planet? is for all those who seek a fuller understanding of the science surrounding both Pluto and the provocative recent discoveries in our outer solar system.

David A. Weintraub is Professor of Astronomy at Vanderbilt University, which in 2003 honored him with the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Speakers

Dr. William C. Keel

As an astronomer especially interested in galaxies, I have made a practice of getting photons wherever I can, having made appearances at Kitt Peak, Cerro Tololo, La Palma, La Silla, the MMT, the 6-meter Bolshoi Teleskop Azimutal'nyi, the IRTF, and the VLA. I have become pretty multispectral, using data from Voyager 2, IUE, IRAS, Einstein, ROSAT, ISO, UIT, HST, Chandra, GALEX, and FUSE. These data support studies of the effects of interactions on galaxies, the history of galaxy merging, triggering of star formation and nuclear activity in galaxies, and too many other projects that have struck my fancy. In the more socially respectable part of my job, I teach at the University of Alabama; mostly introductory astronomy courses with occasional forays into extragalactic astronomy and observational techniques at the graduate level. Unlike many professional astronomers, I got my start in the back yard many years ago and retain a soft spot for eyeballing the Universe.

Dr. Scott Hawley

When Scott Hawley joined the Belmont faculty in the fall of 2006, he was ending his sixth year as a postdoctoral researcher in the field of numerical relativity, a discipline combining elements of computational physics, nonlinear wave mechanics, astrophysics and gravitation theory. He was also mixing his second studio album as a singer-songwriter. Dr. Hawley is grateful for the opportunity combine his enthusiasm for physics and music by teaching at Belmont, particularly in teaching physics classes for Audio Engineering Technology students.

Dr. Hawley received a B.S. in Physics from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. Bob O'Dell

"My first remembered interest in astronomy was when my sixth grade teacher asked us all to write a one page paper on "What I want to be doing in 25 years" and I wrote that I wanted to be an astronomer observing with the 200-inch telescope at Palomar Observatory. How did I come up with this? It must have been "My Weekly Reader" a newspaper for kids, which was giving a lot of attention to the Palomar giant since it was just getting into operation then. I pushed my folks to buy me a set of optics for a small telescope when in the seventh grade and used these to build my first telescope and the Orion Nebula was one of the first objects I looked at

Dr. O'Dell will be speaking on the creation of the Hubble telescope.

Dr. Allyn Smith

J. Allyn Smith, Assistant Professor, joined the APSU faculty in 2006 with a B.S. in General and Molecular Biology, an M.S. in Space Sciences (Atmospheric Physics), an M.S. in Space Technology (Space Systems Operations), and a Ph.D. in Space Sciences (Astrophysics), all from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, FL. His background is in observational astrophysics with primary research interests in the late stages of stellar evolution and survey calibration.