Ray A. Lucas
Some people consider their work a calling. In my case, it
literally was, but I'll get back to that later... The story
is somewhat long and complicated, and too long for me to
really tell or for you to read here! But, if you're really
desperate for something to read right now, well, I guess you
must be trying to avoid something else you probably should be doing!
In that case, read on, dear reader...
Like many other people who have ended up in astronomy, I also
wanted to be an astronomer as a child, and I can distinctly
remember reading specific books about the planets and stars
at various points in my elementary school education, unwilling
even to put them down when I got to the dinner table, and
being fascinated enough that I demanded that I be allowed to
use the little money I had saved to buy
things like adult-level Scientific American astronomy books
on the occasions when we visited the nearby planetarium in
Chapel Hill. I can also remember often being very difficult for
my parents to get to the dinner table because I was engrossed
in something I found fascinating. On one occasion I remember in
particular, I was still in the car long after a trip, lost in the
midst of a long newspaper article about quasars and cosmology and
things like the edge of the universe (there is no "edge" as such
- all of space was contained within the point that expanded as
the Big Bang) and event horizons. And, I can especially
remember lying on my back in a field on our farm and looking
up at the Milky Way, and realizing that I was looking out at
the plane of the galaxy, and that beyond that, to either side,
was the halo of the galaxy, and then intergalactic space.
This was quite a revelation in perspective - that I was lying
on the temporarily night-time side of a spinning spherical rock,
looking out at the galaxy, and beyond! As a student at
Orange High School in Orange County,
near the town of
Hillsborough, North Carolina, although involved in the
kinds of things many high school kids everywhere were involved
in, I never forgot this different and larger perspective which
took me beyond the daily concerns of a teenager's life.
As a child, I wanted to do practically everything, and I
thought that I could, and that I should be able to... We
all learn that we have limitations, but we also sometimes
learn that we often have never really fully tested them or
our capacity to learn. My own father, mother, brother, and
grandparents, as well as a number of other relatives and
family friends when I was a child, all
exceptional people in their own ways, taught me that there
is always more to learn. The same is true of the many exceptional
people with whom I have been fortunate to meet, work, and play, in
astronomy, music and the arts, and in sports I've played like
basketball and football, and indeed, of the many exceptional people
I've been fortunate to meet in life in general.
In school, I sometimes had a strange and maddening tendency in
math and physics classes to solve
the problems that everyone else missed and then miss too many of
the ones that everyone else solved!
Thus, I rarely shied away from a challenge, but sometimes jumped
in over my head... Learning that I could do some things
was something of a comfort, once learned,
belying all the trouble I sometimes had convincing myself of
the right way to do something in some circumstances. But both
science and math proceed by hard work, and by
looking into the darkness and shining a light to
satisfy a healthy intellectual curiosity and/or equally to overcome
fear and apprehension.
It is by such fits and starts, and
by overcoming our own stumbling blocks that we learn.
The human brain, of course, is still one of the greatest mysteries
in the universe!
Having many interests means that you are rarely if ever
bored for long, at least as long as you can make the opportunity
to think about interesting things. My first love in science
as a child was astronomy, but I must have gotten a bit lost from
that direct path because
I also wanted to be a photographer,
a paleontologist, an archaeologist, a geologist, a musician,
an artist, a historian, a linguist, a calligrapher, a cryptographer,
an athlete, a train engineer, an aerospace engineer,
a cartographer, a mountaineer, an adventurer and explorer of
distant and exotic places, a pilot, and an astronaut among
many other things too numerous to mention. (I'm sure
that I have forgotten some of them!) In high school, I was picked
by science teachers to be part of a small group of students from area
high schools who went to science lectures and demonstrations at various
local universities given by professors and researchers on subjects from
astronomy and astrophysics to computers, forestry, medicine, and
zoology. So, I was fortunate again to be exposed to a wide variety
of high-quality local experts who could serve to fuel my equally wide
variety of interests, although it was also somewhat overwhelming in
some sense, because I still wanted to do everything! Fortunately, I
have also gotten to indulge some of these childhood dreams as an
adult, sometimes at levels or in ways I may have dreamed of but had no
inkling that I would ever be able or fortunate enough to achieve.
In sports, as a freshman, I was fortunate to receive a personal
letter from my university's basketball coaches inviting me to try
out for the team, and then to have a very brief college basketball
career, although it didn't even last until the
first game or even the team picture. After grueling tryouts and
making the cuts despite a lot of very good competition, those of us
remaining not already on scholarship had been told by
the coaches that we'd made the team and so I got my official university
practice gear and began the life of a collegiate athlete, but several
weeks later, I hurt
my ankle severely and was the first case of attrition that season.
I handed back my practice gear and today don't even have any
memento of that brief time (except the letter, somewhere), but as
brief as it was, it taught me
a lot. First, it exposed me to some exceptional people and reinforced
a great experience in learning and development I had there at a
basketball camp in between the 11th and 12th grades. And then,
it reminded me that great things were possible, as in the case of
the Orange High School basketball program that won a state
championship when I was in the 10th grade. (Although it was perhaps
not always as openly confrontational in our school's case as in films
such as Remember the Titans, it was at a time in the south during
the final, full integration of schools, and we players both black and
white, varsity and junior varsity - since we all practiced together -
felt and were made aware of the need to be an example of
achievement for the rest of the school through teamwork and unity and
respect. We learned a lot from each other, developed friendships we
might not otherwise have had, shared much laughter and pain, and great
things were indeed achieved! I think these lessons are more relevant
than ever in the world we live in today.) And both experiences in the
10th grade
and as a freshman in college reminded me that I could do
more than others expected, or even than I expected of myself, if
I worked hard when placed in a situation optimized for success.
I understood these issues readily as applied to sports and social
change taking place at the time, but in terms of academics, I had
such widely varying interests that it took a good while
for me to fully realize and internalize these
things, and I often floundered from subject to subject as an
undergraduate, very interested in many subjects, but unfortunately
not always most interested at the same time I happened to be in a
given class. My eye was always on something beyond where I was at
any given instant, it seemed. And then, with a degree in zoology
(and an accidental double major in psychology) practically in hand,
I rediscovered my original love and passion for astronomy, and from
that point on, I usually couldn't get enough of it. Though still
taking a wide variety of courses like Chinese Literature in
Translation and Classical Archaeology at
UNC-Chapel Hill and also Canadian History at
Duke,
I spent more and more time at the observatory
both before and after graduation, until my former professor finally
just gave me a key, admonishing me only to avoid conflicting
with the times for which other classes and grad students were signed
up. Chapel Hill was the kind of college town where many ex-students
wanted to remain, and I was no exception. There were non-practicing
MDs working as medical lab technicians, people with PhDs working as
clerks, people with 5 different degrees looking for work in any one
of their fields. And not only were there just the UNC-Chapel Hill
students with which to compete for those jobs, but also the ones from
nearby Duke (8 miles away), and NC State (about 25 miles away), plus
others from the many other public and private universities in the
Research Triangle and Piedmont Triad, such as Wake Forest, and the
constant influx of more highly-educated people from elsewhere into
the Research Triangle Area in general. In such
an environment, any job you could get was a
good one, at least for a while, and I was blessed to have a number of
very interesting ones (or to be able to make them more interesting.)
And indeed,
I had done quite a few other things while living in Chapel Hill -
working as a sometimes paid, sometimes volunteer announcer and music
programmer at a large public radio station,
WUNC-FM, where I was
given the freedom to play music as diverse as Mozart, Sun Ra,
Cajun music,
Javanese gamelan, blues,
Ghanian drummers, Irish folk bands, and music of all other sorts I
could make work in the same set if I wished. Along with a more
free-form program on Friday nights, I did some "all-classical"
programs, and also some late-night jazz shows, and was about the
third or fourth person there to do a long-running show loosely based
on traditional music of various kinds called
Back Porch Music.
Being a musician who
sometimes played in various places around town myself, I greatly
appreciated this freedom to approach music as a continuum, and I
enjoyed meeting and getting to play music with many great musicians
who came to town to visit, especially musicians of the various
"folk" varieties, although I don't really like to use labels...
I also was fortunate to get to work at the
Morehead Planetarium,
a place which had contributed greatly to my early interest in
astronomy when my parents took me there, and where all the U.S.
astronauts in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs had
trained in celestial navigation. I enjoyed doing a variety of work
while there - doing art work for the staff artist, helping install
and test a new computer and automation system, helping put in a
new sound studio, building special effects, helping maintain
the Zeiss VI planetarium projector, and giving live lectures to the
public on various topics in astronomy. Since I also worked at the
radio station, I wrote and recorded pieces on astronomy for broadcast
on behalf of the Morehead Planetarium. At various other times, I worked
in pulmonary medicine research, a Near East-North Africa public health
training program, and the Chemistry Department, all the while continuing
to take further coursework in things like computer
programming, climatology, and remote sensing as a graduate and university
employee. I even tried out for a part in a play in Duke University's
Summer Theatre at Duke program, and through some means unknown to me,
since I had no acting experience or education at all in my background,
still managed to survive the auditions and callbacks and win a small
part in a play, George Bernard Shaw's "The Devil's Disciple", set in
18th century America, during the American Revolution. And throughout
this time, I continued to play music and to
also do things at the observatory as often as possible. All in all, it
was an interesting and stimulating life.
In the Spring of 1985, a professor of astronomy at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Morris Davis, ran into me at a
downtown crosswalk on East Franklin Street there and literally
asked me if I would be interested in working on the Space Telescope.
He told me that he had received a call from someone at the
Space Telescope Science
Institute (STScI), the science institute for the Hubble Telescope,
and that he had taken the liberty of giving them my name. All I can
say is that he knew something of the kinds of things I had been
doing on my own there for some years after not getting to do all I
wanted in that upper-level observational astronomy course. He
must have thought that I needed to be put to work in astronomy
since it seemed I was doing it for free already while doing a
number of other things to keep myself fed and housed.
Not long after my encounter
with Morris Davis, and after talking with
the folks at STScI and getting more advice from Bruce Carney, Wayne
Christiansen, and Jon Thomas at UNC, I was essentially plucked from
the streets of Chapel Hill and given an opportunity to work on the
Hubble Telescope. One can never say "thank you" enough for great
opportunities like that, but here I wish to say it publicly to all
those people who helped make it possible. It is also gratifying to
see the Physics and Astronomy Department at UNC-Chapel Hill now
being active partners in the new
SOAR (Southern Observatory
for Astrophysical Research) Telescope being built on top of Cerro
Pachon, near Cerro Tololo, in the Chilean Andes, as well as other new
projects like the
Southern African Large Telescope
(SALT).
I was brought to STScI by Computer Sciences Corporation to work with
the late
Barry Lasker and his group who were creating the
Guide Star Catalog
as well as a
digital version of the entire sky. There could
not have been a better place to begin, since working there afforded
me the opportunity to work with a person of such exceptional character
as Barry, and his group, and to see a myriad of interesting objects
on Schmidt
plates and in digital images on the computer every day. As well as
the work on the Guide Stars project, this led me into a project on
polar ring galaxies with Brad Whitmore who was a great person to
work with and who was most gracious to
include me on that project, which was a perfect way to
pursue my interest in so-called "peculiar" galaxies which were often
the products of galaxy interactions and mergers. During this time, I
was also fortunate to take more classwork on galaxies at
Johns Hopkins
with Colin Norman, Allan Sandage, George Miley, and Alex Szalay. I
could only wish that I was as good a student as they deserved to have.
After completion of the first version of the Guide Star Catalog and
the completion of the first generation all-sky digital image archive,
in March 1989, I took a job with
AURA in the
user support area of
STScI. It was about this time that I first observed at places like the
Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, a part of the
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
(NOAO),
and the Very
Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes
in New Mexico, a part of the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
(NRAO). I began to get more involved with proposed HST projects
to study interacting and merging galaxies and distant galaxy clusters.
Before the first HST servicing mission, I was asked by Alan Dressler
and Bill Sparks to become more involved in the
early "deep" WFPC2
observations of the medium redshift galaxy cluster
CL0939+4713 (Abell 851)
which were designed to demonstrate the capabilities of HST and
the new WFPC2 with corrective optics as applied to the study of more
distant galaxies. At about the same time, a proposal with Kirk Borne
and others to study ring galaxies including the
Cartwheel Galaxy was
accepted by the HST TAC, and some time after that, with Curt Struck
and Phil Appleton, we published a
paper on giant infalling
comet-like
gas clouds in the Cartwheel. Other projects then followed in
succession.
A proposal to study the globular cluster systems in different kinds
of galaxies in different environments led to a study of the
globular
cluster population of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 in the Virgo
Cluster, again with Brad Whitmore, Bill Sparks, and others. The earlier
involvement with the CL0939+4713 WFPC2 imaging helped lead to my
subsequent involvement in the original
Hubble Deep Field-North project with Bob
Williams et al. since the quality of the new Abell 851 images and the
things one could learn from them had been one of Bob's inspirations
for the HDF. Also, not long after that and again with Kirk Borne and
others, a large HST snapshot survey of ultraluminous infrared galaxies
with WFPC2 and another smaller one with NICMOS which we proposed were
both approved and thus far, among other things, have yielded a
public release and
paper on
multiple galaxy mergers, a
paper on NICMOS nuclear properties, a
NICMOS catalog paper, and a
paper on the QDOT sample of galaxies, plus a number of other
smaller papers. At about the same time, I was invited to be a part of
two HDF-North follow-ups using NICMOS with Mark Dickinson et al. and
using STIS with Harry Ferguson et al. Soon after, I was also involved
in the
Hubble Deep Field-South project, and more recently, was invited
by Mauro Giavalisco et al. to be a part of a large HST
Treasury proposal which we proposed and which was accepted, the
Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey,
or GOODS. The original part of the GOODS project is also a
SIRTF (Space Infrared Telescope
Facility) Legacy project, and both the HST and SIRTF portions of
the GOODS project utilize archival data from another of NASA's Great
(Space) Observatories, the
Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
Another project related to GOODS in which I became involved is being
a member of the STScI Working Group for the HST
ACS Ultra-Deep Field which was done in the middle of the
GOODS southern field in the area of the Chandra Deep Field-South. The
ACS Ultra-Deep Field is the new "deepest optical image of the
sky" as were the original HDF-N WFPC2 image and the HDF-S STIS image
before it. As a part of the HUDF parallels programs which I helped
design in collaboration with Massimo Stiavelli and others, we also
produced the deepest infrared observations ever taken of the sky at
that time. We (Stiavelli et al.) have followed that up with a program
(the so-called UDF05 program) to do deep optical imaging on those
parallel deepest infrared fields and more (deeper) infrared imaging in
a portion of the original HUDF in order to search for very high-redshift
early galaxies near the era of the reionization of the universe.
In addition to these things, I have also recently been
observing VLIRGs (Very Luminous Infrared Galaxies) with fellow STScI
colleague and IAC staff member Santiago Arribas
at the
Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos
on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, Spanish islands in the Atlantic
Ocean off the southern coast of Morocco. Astronomy is a good field
for traveling to beautiful mountain tops from time to time, and it
has also enabled me to observe at other places like
McDonald Observatory in West Texas, and to visit observatories and
telescopes at places like the
Kitt Peak National Observatory
(KPNO) outside of Tucson, Arizona, and the
~14,000-foot summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai'i where
there are a large number and variety of telescopes such as the
Keck,
Subaru,
Gemini-North,
Canada-France-Hawai'i
(CFHT), and
James Clerk
Maxwell Submillimetre Telescope (JCMT) and
United Kingdom
Infrared Telescope (UKIRT), among others, and other places like
Palomar
Observatory,
Mount Wilson Observatory, and the
Green Bank radio astronomy
observatory. And scientific meetings and etc. have enabled me to travel
to other astronomical institutions in interesting places such as the
Dominion
Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) in Victoria, British Columbia, the
Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte in Naples, the
Bologna Astronomical Observatory
of the
Astronomy Department of the
University of
Bologna, the
Institute of
Astronomy at the
University of Cambridge in England,
the offices of the
European Southern Observatory
in Garching, near Munich,
and to work on data as a visitor at the
Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
in La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife, also one of the Canary Islands.
Also, in the last few years, I have worked on a project on a ring galaxy
called
Hoag's Object
at the request of the
Hubble Heritage Program
(see also
an
introduction and
my
article for the general public on this galaxy, with many thanks to
Tiffany Borders, who did the image processing for Hubble Heritage)
and an
ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys)
calibration target called the
Boomerang
Nebula
which they also used as one of their image releases.
I also have an approved, funded
NVO research
program to add some
VLA
radio data I took to the
National Virtual Observatory (NVO)
repository and to use the NVO resources to do a multiwavelength study
of this sample of steep spectrum radio sources from the
Texas Interferometer Survey. I gave this
talk (pdf file version) on the project at the IAU meeting in Prague,
Czech Republic, in August 2006.
Most recently, for the last few years, I have been a co-Investigator on the
CANDELS program, the largest award of
Hubble observing time ever given out to any scientific collaboration, amounting
to more than 900 orbits. The aim of this program is to study galaxy evolution
in 5 very well-studied fields, GOODS-N, GOODS-S, UDS, COSMOS, and EGS.
And, I am also a member of the core STScI Frontier Fields Team designing, planning, and
implementing the so-called
Hubble Frontier Fields, which aims to provide non-proprietary, Director's Discretionary
data for the wider astronomical community to use the gravitational mass in distant galaxy
clusters as gravitational lenses to magnify the most distant, young galaxies behind
them in the early universe, to study their numbers and de-projected morphologies,
pushing the frontiers of what the Hubble Space Telescope can achieve together with
the effects of gravitational lensing, in anticipation of the capabilities of the
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to be launched late in this decade, around 2018. We
are designing and planning the observations, and will produce clean, calibrated images
and object catalogs for the greater astronomical community to study and explore.
A great deal of this I must ascribe to having always just
followed things I found interesting as best I could and then having
been fortunate that someone else noticed what I was doing and,
maybe thinking it was worthwhile or that I could contribute
something, then gave me a greater opportunity when they were in a
position to do so. It certainly was not
because I had a plan for my life all worked out. In fact,
it was almost exactly the opposite. It is not always easy
to live this way when you're young because those around you can't
always see where you are going, nor in fact can you even see this
yourself at times, so it can be frustrating and can also take a great
belief in the power of your own interests to lead you to places you ought
to be or in which you can make some useful contribution to society.
It also is not always easy to live this way because it requires not
only action on your part in following and doing the things you love,
but also great patience and perseverance, since, even if you
believe what you are doing is worthwhile, you don't always know
that some interest will lead to a way of making a living, which is
of course a big concern for most of us!
Be all that as it may, despite having taken a long and fairly
complicated detour through many other fields, I eventually
found my way back to astronomy, and then it found me! But I have
also learned a lot and had many interesting experiences from all
the other things I've done. Even failure at something is better
than never trying, and I do tend to believe that old saying that the
only person who never fails is the person who is too afraid and
never tries anything, which is of course, the ultimate failure!
Of course, none of us ever wants to fail at
anything, and rightly so, but when we do, we as humans often learn
as much or more
from failure as we do from success, hence the importance of trying,
although that advice is often difficult for me to follow, myself!
Because of being associated with HST on some web sites here, I
sometimes get letters from people around the world who want to
know how to get into astronomy or to advance their studies in
that way. But, a bit like professional sports, there are not so
many jobs in astronomy, even today, so first, I would say that it
should be done primarily for the love of it, especially since
astronomers are not paid salaries like professional athletes or
movie stars or rock stars, or sometimes even like some other technical
professionals. Your time is the most valuable thing, and if you
have been doing something you loved, then in some sense it was not
wasted even if it has not made you financially rich, although, at
some level, you have to tend to these things to the degree necessary
for the way in which you wish to live. Second,
for anyone, especially young people, trying to figure out what
to do with their lives and
their talents and energy, I would say that there are lots of beneficial
things to try and do, as long as they are not hurtful to people
and are done to promote love and understanding rather than hate.
In the realm of
science, for example, medical imaging is one thing that comes to
mind. There are many more health care facilities than astronomical
institutions, and likewise many more jobs in medicine than in
astronomy, yet some of the technologies and skills required are
similar in some ways (even some astronomical hardware and software
has been adapted to medical uses by some people here at STScI working
in collaboration with people at medical institutions),
and increases in the capabilities of such technology to aid humanity
have been dramatic in recent years, although the availability of
such resources to everyone needs to be much greater. That in itself
is a great challenge for young minds at present and for the future.
For me, the world is a far richer place in spirit and inspiration
for all of these detours I've taken! And I still hope for a family
and children of my own, someday. As any parent can tell you, I'm sure,
that would be the greatest challenge and adventure of all!
Finally, here is a bit more about
hobbies, etc.
Photo credits: Skip Westphal (L); Harry & Amy Braun (R)
An Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy (ULIRG) adorning my computer screen (L),
and playing fiddle for an audience at a festival in Chapel Hill, NC (R).
The Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA are not responsible for the
contents of my pages or links from them.
Ray Lucas
lucas@stsci.edu
08/31/02