My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.
Certainly by the time I was in seventh grade, I knew I had to have a long education if I wanted to become an astronomer, but I figured I'd try it, and if I didn't get far enough, I could always end up teaching in high school or math or physics.
I knew there was a school where women could study astronomy. So... it never occurred to me that I couldn't be an astronomer.
I am a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, where I teach an introductory class in cosmology. I see the deficiencies that first-year students show up with.
I had studied at Harvard and MIT astronomy and a lot about the heavens and the star system and so forth.
There's planets, life in the universe. You don't talk about that in high school - or maybe I skipped class that day.
I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.
As a confirmed astronomer I'm always for a better sky.
Britain has still got rather fewer astronomers than many other countries - the French and the Italians, for example. Why is that? I don't think those countries have better brains.
Why did not somebody teach me the constellations, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day?
As a member of the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, I am a firm believer in the American space program.
