Astronomical Society Is Bestowing Honors

This month, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific will present its awards for 2002 during its annual meeting at the University of California, Berkeley.

The ASP’s highest honor, the Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal, will go to Bohdan Paczynski, Lyman Spitzer Jr Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University. The society is recognizing his “revolutionary work in many fields of astronomy” and notes that he has made “major contributions to our understanding of interacting binary stars.”

Volker Bromm will receive the Robert J. Trumpler Award, which is presented to a recent PhD recipient whose doctoral research is considered unusually important to astronomy. Bromm earned his doctorate in 2000 from Yale University under the guidance of Richard Larson and Paolo Coppi. His dissertation was entitled “Star Formation in the Early Universe.” He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The ASP will present its Dorothea Klumpke-Roberts Award, which recognizes an individual’s outstanding contributions to the public’s understanding and appreciation of astronomy, to two space artists. Don Davis of Palm Springs, California, is being acknowledged for his artwork and animations for planetarium shows, movies, and television programs such as the television series Cosmos. Jon Lomberg of Honaunau, Hawaii, has “gained fame as Carl Sagan’s longtime collaborator,” according to the ASP. He was the chief artist for Cosmos and designed astronomical animation for the film Contact. He also was the design director for NASA’s Voyager interstellar record.

Dean Ketelsen, senior research specialist at the Steward Observatory’s Mirror Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, will receive the Las Cumbres Amateur Outreach Award, which the ASP first presented last year. The award honors outreach to the public and to children by an amateur astronomer. Since 1991, Ketelsen has organized an annual “Grand Canyon Star Party” at which volunteer amateur astronomers help visitors gain an appreciation of the night sky.

The Maria and Eric Muhlmann Award will go to François Roddier, who retired in December 2000 from his position as an astronomer at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. The award honors scientists who have obtained important research results based on their development of groundbreaking instruments and techniques. According to the ASP, “since the 1980s, Roddier has played a key role in the development of adaptive optics … [and has] pioneered the theory of adaptive optics, particularly the understanding of atmospheric turbulence.”

The ASP will present its Thomas J. Brennan Award to Philip M. Sadler, Francis W. Wright Lecturer and director of the science education department at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, for exceptional achievement related to the teaching of pre-college astronomy. According to the ASP, he has headed many institutes and curriculum projects to improve the teaching of science. He also invented the Starlab Portable Planetarium, which brings the night sky to an estimated 12 million children annually.