I imagine it's because of my being a research Ph.D. astronomer at Western Michigan University, the first of its kind there, that I've been invited by a couple of the officers to write a little column or two about myself. Actually, I was asked to take up as much space as possible, so here is my story - interesting or boring as heck? You decide...

    My name is Kirk Korista. I was born in February of 1963 while my dad completed his M.S. in Structural Engineering at the University of Illinois. He now builds large office towers around the world (like the Sears Tower in Chicago), so the U of I must have taught him something. I grew up with my father, mother, and sisters in a small town SW of Chicago. At about age 10 I got my first telescope:  a 60 mm Jason refractor. Since I can remember, I had an interest in the sky. Important to the origin of that interest was that I COULD SEE THE STARS IN THE SKY, even a dim Milky Way. My interests through school were science and history, but I did not decide to become an astronomer until my sophomore year in high school. For my 15th birthday, my parents gave me a book, The Iron Sun, by Adrian Berry, sort of a science oriented sci-fi about black holes and their possible use in time and space travel. I was hooked, and I knew I wanted to become an astronomer.  At that point I went out and read every astronomy book I could buy, and by the time I graduated high school I knew enough to breeze through 2 semesters of intro astronomy in my Freshman year of college.

    In 1981 I graduated from the same high school my father did and started at the U of I, majoring in astronomy. Because of my tendency to look up at the skies (even in daytime since weather is an interest of mine), my dorm nickname was "spaceman". One does not just take astronomy classes, however, to become an astronomer. To maximize your chances in getting into a good graduate school, it is a good idea to take as many physics classes as you possibly can, along with some advanced mathematics (through advanced calculus and differential equations). This I did, taking 12 semester courses of physics and 5 of mathematics, in addition to 7 astronomy classes. I was also lucky in that I got to learn to use the 100 year old 12-inch Warner & Swasey refractor at the old observatory on campus, showing many an underclassmen views of the starry skies (well, not too starry from that location). During the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years, I worked as a "tour guide" at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. I enjoyed that a lot. Sometimes I worked the public phones answering questions about the UFO in the sky (Venus), or occasionally other things. During the summer in between my Junior and Senior years, I worked with a radio astronomer, John Dickel, and his graduate student Rick Arendt, studying young Galactic supernova remnants (SNR: debris from a massive star that exploded). Topping it off was a trip to the Very Large Array to observe Kepler's SNR. The VLA is a spectacular sight and worth a visit. It's in the middle of nowhere, west-central New Mexico. But beautiful! During my senior year, more good luck. Some of the new graduate students did not show up and the astronomy department was short of teaching assistants. They asked me and I got my first academic-astronomy paycheck and my first taste of teaching.

    I married my college sweetheart in July 1985 and after honeymooning in Yellowstone N.P. we moved to Columbus, OH, where I started graduate school in astronomy at the Ohio State University, a place at least as cloudy as Kalamazoo. Again, to better your future chances in getting a job, it is advisable that you pick up as many graduate physics classes as you reasonably can in your first two years of study.

    The astronomy department had a small planetarium that I learned to use and a wonderful old Perkins Observatory 15 miles north of town with a 32-inch fork mount Cassegrain telescope in it. It sits on a glacial moraine overlooking the Olentangy river valley, next to the "Big Ear" radio observatory, which did a big radio survey of the sky and found lots of quasars in the early-mid 1960s. That site gets about 1 photometric night per year, maybe 70-100 "clear" nights per year, with Nov-Apr virtually socked in. In 1924 when the observatory was completed with a 69-inch German equatorial mount telescope inside, it was the 3rd largest telescope in the world! (behind the Mt. Wilson's Hooker 100-inch and the Mt. Hamilton's Lick Observatory Shane 120-inch) "How the heck did that happen?", you might ask. Well, Hiram Perkins was a young university science & astronomy professor at Ohio Wesleyan University,  in Deleware, Ohio, just north of the observatory, in 1860. During the Civil War, the university  had to shut down, due to a lack of available men, and Dr. Perkins became rich selling pork bellies to the Union army. He built this observatory with that money and I think he got to see it partially or nearly completed before he died at a ripe old age. Soon after, OWU asked OSU to  staff the observatory, and that's how OSU got into the act. In 1960, the 69-inch telescope was  hauled out of the dome aperture with a crane, loaded on a truck, its mirror replaced with a  Corning 72-inch mirror, and put on a beautiful mesa looking at the cinder-cone San Francisco Peaks outside of Flagstaff, AZ, as part of Lowell Observatory - another place with an  outstanding history, but I that's another story. Somebody died and left the Perkins Observatory  with the present Schottland 32-inch telescope, that now sits upon the southern pier in Perkins  Observatory. By the way, these piers reach ~ 70 feet underground to bedrock, and the 32-inch telescope sitting on one of these piers looks silly inside of the gigantic dome that housed the  former telescope with its huge German-equatorial mount counterweight. However, the views  of globular clusters were fantastic, like diamonds on black velvet. I got to do the sky shows for  the public there during my 3rd and 4th year at OSU. Perkins is up for sale, as OSU is unloading  its support so that it can get involved in large telescope projects. $100,000/year anyone?

    I did my graduate research on the optical spectroscopy of active galaxies and quasars using the revamped 72-inch scope at its new site in Arizona. These are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers (10 million to 1 billion times the mass of our Sun!) accreting matter and converting the gravitational potential energy into light energy equaling the light of the rest of whole galaxy or even 100 times that! (Drop a book on the floor: the resulting energy released via sound, heat, and deformation of the book is an example of the release of gravitational potential energy) This all takes place in volume not much larger than our solar system. We can observe these bright beacons all the way back in time to the first billion years of the existence of our Universe. Gas clouds moving around the supermassive black hole are ionized (atoms have their electrons knocked off) by the energetic photons of light and fluoresce in the form of emission lines. These "lines" are very broad, owing to the Doppler effect of gas moving 1000s of kilometers per second. Because of the expansion of the universe, we observe the quasar and active galaxy spectra to be ``redshifted'', that is shifted to longer or redder wavelengths. If the quasar redshifts are large, we can observe the ultraviolet spectrum in the optical, while the optical lines are shifted into the infrared. When first found in radio surveys in the late 1950's and identified in the optical as point sources (star-like) in 1960, they were mysterious sources of blue light and radio waves, with unidentified emission lines. They were dubbed "quasars", short for "quasi-stellar radio sources". Then in 1963 Maartin Schmidt of Caltech noodled over the spectrum of 3C 273 and was seen running out of his office screaming "ah-ha!", or some such utterance. He was looking at the hydrogen Balmer series redshifted by 16% the speed of light! So quasars are the brighter, more distant, cousins of the bright "nuclear emission line galaxies" found by Vesto Slipher of Lowell Obsevatory in 1918 and Carl Seyfert in the 1940s.

End of part 1

    In August 1990 I received my Ph.D. in astronomy. By this time I had two young boys (one born between my two Ph.D. candidacy exams the other during my thesis writing), and we "loaded up the truck and moved to Beverley. Hills that is, swimming pools, movie stars..." While the truck hauled our earthly belongings, we trekked cross-country to see the sites on our way to LA-LA land. Actually, Pasadena. We lived 4 blocks south of the Rose Parade route, 4 blocks to the west of the Caltech campus and every day I walked 1.6 miles through the sometimes thick sludge they call air to my first "postdoc" job at the Carnegie Observatories to work with the famed quasar astronomer, Ray Weymann. One is expected to do at least 1 postdoc, but 2-4 are not unusual before landing a tenure-track position. Each stint lasts about 2 years. Carnegie Observatories had just unloaded Mt. Wilson (the 100-inch had gone into mothballs, but now it's come back to life), overlooking Pasadena in the San Gabriel Mountains. Carnegie Obs. had 1/3 time on the Palomar Observatories, shared with owner Caltech and the other 1/3 went to Cornell University. I got to use the famed 200-inch on five separate "observing runs" to view the spectra of distant quasars; a 6th was fogged out just before Christmas and we sat around a fireplace burning foot-long pine cones. The sheer bulk of that telescope still amazes me.

    Carnegie also has its own observatories in the foothills of the Andes Mtns, Las Campanas Observatory. This translates to The Bells, so-named because of the nature of the volcanic rock there. During earthquakes the rocks tumble down the cliff sides, sounding like crystalline glass being clinked together. It's a rocky Mars-scape there, and the Andean condor with its 8-9 foot wing span sailing just overhead catching the daytime updrafts made me feel like I was not at the top of the food chain. A 2.5-meter was its flagship, but now under the Magellan Project they are building two 6.5-meter telescopes at that location. The Chilean observatory food was great and I really enjoyed observing there on two occasions.

    On my first trip to Las Campanas, I had to carry into Santiago, Chile a tip/tilt camera adaptor and a commercial Nikon camera for a Boller & Chivens CCD spectrograph, the adaptor hurriedly designed by myself in less than 1 month's time when we found out that our spectrograph of choice was out of commission. I had all the right papers, but the Chilean authorities thought I was going to sell the thing and make mega bucks. I sat in an interrogation room for what seemed like hours before they got a hold of our observatory headquarters in La Serena (I spoke very little Spanish). They confiscated my passport and let me go. It was rumored that a little flowers & wine bribe to certain officials' wives in Santiago got my passport released just before I had to leave. Ah, corruption. The second time around we spent fighting 45 mph winds and then a freak April snowstorm. When we got back to Santiago our 757 had one of its engine in roughly 10,000 pieces just off the runway, and they told us to go home. So we had the whole weekend to spend (they didn't fly on weekends!) in Santiago. A wonderful city not so much for its sites as for its people. The whole weekend the city was filled with people and their families strolling parks, eating at outside cafes, and then what I would call a festival on all 3 nights. No special occasion, but whole streets were be blocked off - filled with people from the very young to very old talking, singing, selling, performing,  eating, holding hands. This went on past our bedtime; we couldn't make it much  past 1 am,  and it was still going strong even into the wee hours of Monday! People there do take siestas  during the afternoon hours, and many restaurants don't open until 11 pm. What a way to  spend life with a family, preferable, in my opinion, to sitting cooped-up in front of the "tube".

    Southern California is a place of extremes (apologies to those native to LA). A place of wonder: 1 hour's drive can take you to 2 desert environments (high and low elevation), coastal and continental mountain ranges, the beaches (and grey whales!), canyons, and we hiked nearly every weekend (5-7 hours drive gets you to Sequoia and Yosemite). The almost year-round fresh fruits and veggies were also wonderful. But it is also a place of an unbelievable concrete-gigaopolis with loads of social problems. The public schools were a disaster. We arrived in their worst draught, then had some biblical floods that next winter (whole trailer parks were literally washed out to sea). Four earthquakes (our first, a 6.0 in a fault that raised the San Gabriels, raised Mt. Wilson a bit higher) and 1 riot later (just 10 minutes drive from that disaster, we spent 4 days locked in our apartment, glued to our TV to tell us whether or not we should flee to the desert, the air outside unbreathable from the fires), my job was finished and we moved to the other coast in September 1992.

    My second postdoc (1992-1994) was at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI: home of the Hubble Space Telescope) in Baltimore, MD. What a place, several dozen astronomers all in one building, with world famous astronomers passing through to give talks. I got to use the HST in a mission to monitor spectroscopically a relatively nearby (250 million light-years), variable active galaxy (39 sets of spectra in 39 days). Just as whales and bats measure their environments with sonar, the variable source of ionizing photons reverberates in the surrounding clouds as the latter fluoresce as variable sources of emission lines. While these regions are much too small to image directly, we can use this reverberation technique to deduce the geometry and dynamics (motions) of the line emitting cloud region. Then there was the first "refurbishment" mission to the HST. Before the mission we met the crew of the Endeavor. During the mission we sat on the edges of our seats, because if this mission failed we might all be out looking for jobs... Afterwards we celebrated a wholly unexpectedly successful mission, and our families were invited to meet the astronauts up close and personal. I have pictures of my kids with many of them and all of their autographs. Storey Mussgrave is quite a guy.

    Of course this area of the country is full of mountains, coastal wetlands, and history, history, history within 1-2 hours drive. Because of the opportunities that have come my way, my kids have probably been to more national parks and historic sites than many.

    It was here that I also traveled to Australia to use the 3.9-meter Anglo-Australia Telescope in the middle of a Koala bear national park. Those things are nocturnal and shy and I did not get to see one, but I did bump into jumping 4 foot 'roos in the early dawn light as I stumbled my way back to the guest observers' dorm. It was there that I experienced the worst seeing in transparent skies that I have ever seen. Our 10th magnitude standard star disappeared into the twilight sky through the 3.9-meter as its image blew up to who knows what size seeing-disk. I stepped outside to see what was the matter and what should I see but stars appearing to twirl around, changing colors (red, yellow, green, blue, repeat), like the big faceted balls in discos. We knew we could do no science, though it was otherwise crystal clear, and so we "swung" the big mirror to Saturn. At first it looked blurry, then it took on the  appearance of a disk with ears, then the whole thing just became a sphere! Saturn unresolved at ~ 1 arcminute seeing! (seeing is a term astronomers use to describe the stability of the atmosphere and so the sharpness of the images - good seeing means that stellar images have a median angular diameters of under 1 arcsecond, or 60 times sharper than what I just described).

    Just before I left this job I gave talks on the results of my work with the HST at a meeting in an ancient abbey town in England (Abingdon, sure enough) where one could touch 1000 year old ruins and in Garching, Germany, outside of Munich. Garching is a town known for its Weiss Bier (wheat beer). My German was better than my Spanish and I got along fine there.

    My first taste of university research and teaching came with my 3rd postdoc (1994-1997) at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington where the Bible and basketball reign as king and queen, and the rebel army still wages a guerilla cold war. Horses, horse racing, and bourbon also contribute to the local flavor. Being a large university town of 225,000 people with a nationally ranked medical school, Lexington could be surprisingly cosmopolitan. But the ways of the mountains and the south were also at the forefront. In general, it's a good family town. Besides being close to the beautiful Appalachians, and their accompanying parks, we were able to attend the first US men's soccer game in Birmingham, AL., during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Never thought I'd ever make it to an Olympic game, but again, opportunity knocked.

    In September of 1994, Storey Mussgrave popped in to give a talk in our department and a public talk (see here ; the guy in the mustache was my supervisor, the other guy with hair is Bob Williams, now former director of STScI and a former mentor of mine. Storey is the bald one of course, and the woman in the upper left is someone he "brought along"). Storey has one of his many degrees from UK (medical?) and Kentucky is one of his homes, or so he said. He gave a fabulous public talk on the first HST refurbishment mission.

    At the University of Kentucky, I continued my research in emission lines of quasars, though now from a theoretical perspective. Using a large (150,000 lines) computer code that generates simulated spectra given some input environmental conditions, I began trying to simulate what I was previously observing, and by doing so deducing the physical conditions of the line emitting gas. I had been using this code part time since I was a graduate student, and now became a full-time user. My research then and now lies in interpreting the spectra I observe. Besides quasars, I am interested in H II regions (e.g., the Orion Nebula) and planetary nebulae, representing the births and deaths of stars. I also got the chance to teach introductory astronomy during my last two semesters there. Lesson: diversify your experiences as much as you can; don't let yourself become a 1-D astronomer!

    Well, after 2 solid years of submitting applications for a tenure-track position, one finally came my way (though not easily, but that's a longer story than the above) in the name of Western Michigan University. After criss-crossing the country, I have ended up within a 2.5 hours drive of where I grew up. At WMU I am teaching astronomy, developing an undergraduate astronomy minor program, asking WMU to build a community observatory (with fingers crossed), continuing my research and grant writing. I also like to get out into the community schools to give talks or drop off astronomy education materials. I hope I can maintain and expand my community outreach activity. If you would like me to come to your child's school or ask me questions concerning astronomy, I'd be happy to talk at any time.

I have probably filled up more space than Richard wanted, so I'd better sign off for now.