Kitt Peak

June 2nd, 2019
​Lexington, Virginia

​Kitt Peak National Observatory

Kitt Peak National Observatory, just outside Tucson, Arizona, is part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. It is run by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in association with the National Science Foundation. 

Eli has been offered a job at Kitt Peak which he has accepted, with a start date of August 1st. He will be helping to manage access to NEID, a state-of-the-art astronomical spectrograph being installed at Kitt Peak.

Given the remoteness of the location, employees work multiple days in a row at the peak and sleep in dormitory-style accommodations. They then have a few days off and repeat the cycle.

Although the application process seemed to drag on forever — ​he initially applied for this job last August — it sounds like a great opportunity and gives him a chance to get to know many people in the academic astrophysics community.

The kids are scattering

With Eli moving out of our home and off to Tucson, the kids are now officially scattered around the country.

Nathan continues to live in Indianapolis and is looking forward to a 3-month volunteer stint in Madagascar at the end of this year. He will be working on two projects: lemur population monitoring and reforestation. He hopes that this experience will "put him over the top" and help him get into graduate school, his longer-term goal.

Ian continues to live life to the fullest as a San Diegan. During the day, he works at NavAIR and is currently assigned to the F-18 cockpit pressurization team. When he's not working, he's climbing mountains, skiing, playing beach volleyball and soccer, and pretty much any other physical activity you can think of.

​Lastly, Cam and his wife Nancy — thankfully — do live close to us. They've got one more year in Charlottesville until Nancy graduates from her Nurse Practitioner program. At that point, they've talked about moving to Richmond and producing our first grandchild, but we're trying to play things down so that they don't realize that we're super-excited about that prospect.

Charlottesville, VA

Indianapolis, IN

San Diego, CA

Tucson, AZ

Books

Magnitude is a must-read for anyone, young or old, with an interest in science. It walks the reader through all of the major items that can be measured (distance, mass, volume, time, and so on) and for each one, shows you how items in our universe scale from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly large. It is all illustrated in fascinating fashion, with the illustrations provided by a woman with a Ph.D. in data visualization. Her work is stunning.

​Check it out.