A Brief Pause From The Ordinary..., Demographics time--please just humor me Options

[voracs]

Looong time lurker... first time poster (just registered... finally!). I'm 42, a lab technologist living in Vancouver, BC, CA. I've been perusing this board since finding it through #maestro on IRC, during those heady days of EDL. It's been an absolute delight to follow the subsequent happenings here. Big compliments to the frequent posters, forum leads and, of course Doug, for assembling such a fine place to keep up to date.

I've been a space enthusiast for as long as I can remember, early interest being fostered by the occasional space article in National Geographic. I couldn't wait for the next issue to come through the mail slot to see if there was an update on Voyager or some new story/pics from Apollo. What a difference the internet has made for the immediacy of information available. I recall during pathfinder/sojourner that I was keeping tabs on its status through the web at the same time as watching the live news conference on CNN. The first images were available on my monitor before they were even shown to the media! It's still fascinating to watch how some theories are hashed out here before their "official" release.

Keep up the good work.

[Phil Stooke]

Hey, edstrick, I met you at LPSC quite a few years ago. I remember your Viking lander false color pans poster!

Phil

[Guest_Myran_*]

Me? Forum lurker!

44 years. Real life job: Janitor.

[edstrick]

<waves belatedly at Phil Stooke>....
I'm around, spaced-out as always...
My PhD Dissertation finished me before I finished it, so I've ended up image processing in industry, more or less watching from the sidelines, CAT scanning space shuttle turbine blades and <couple times> Dinosaur skulls.

[garybeau]

Wow, I can't get over all of the talent here. What a great board. I'm humbled by all the professionals here.
I'm a 49 year old tool and die maker from Connecticut. Have been interested in science, rockets and space since before I could read. Grew up during the Apollo days, but my interest has switched from manned to un-manned over the years. A lot more science and a lot less politics. My hero is Carl Sagan - loved his Nova special Cosmos. If there was ever anyone addicted to science and space news it has got to be me. When I'm done perusing all of the online sources, I'm putting myself to sleep with Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, New Scientist, Scientific American Planetary Report and on and on.............zzzzzzzzz
Glad to meet you all and keep up the great work.

[Patteroast]

Ahh.. hi! I'm new, and figured this would be as good a place as any to make my first post. Unlike other people who mentioned registering recently, I haven't been lurking, I just found out about this forum's existance approximately an hour ago. Just reading around and seeing the passion for unmanned spaceflight that I have seen almost nowhere else... I couldn't resist signing up. It just looks like so much fun here!

I'm an 18-year-old high school student (for six more days until graduation, anyway.) I've been interested in planetary astronomy since the age of four when I found a book about the solar system in a box somewhere... couldn't even read it, and I loved it. Sadly, being born in 1987, I don't even remember the Neptune encounter of Voyager. Probably my earliest memories of any sort of spaceflight was something with Hubble.. not sure, really. But I've been glued to my internet connection for the entire duration of MER, and all of the last few years of Cassini.

Any knowledge of astronomy I have is self-taught, but I like to believe I have a rather good and detailed understanding of most of the topic (at the very least, much more than the majority of people ). I probably have a dozen notebooks lying around with some form of information in them, including constantly updated lists of all the vital stats for the moons.

Okay, I should probably stop babbling (as I have a tendency to do). So, uh.. hello.

[stillgoing]

Hello, all.
42, living in Aldergrove, BC, Canada. I'm a project manager for a company making GPS based products for tracking of offenders.

My earliest memories were watching the Apollo moon landings.

I'm a scout leader, and I periodically teach the kids what I know about astronomy; taking them outside for star-gazing and constellation identifying sessions. I usually try to coincide my sessions with a good Iridium flare. Really fires the kids up, as I explain what made the flash, and more importantly the knowledge and computation that is behind my being able to point to the sky and say look there in 5..4..3..2..1 (Wow!.. Cool!)

For those of you also into mountain biking: The North Shore is my playground.

This site is excellent, and I anticipate many hours of study.

Thanks!

[brianc]

I'm 46 and work for the UK Health Service as an Information Analyst, I have a wife and two girls. I live in a small village Holcombe Brook, just north of Manchester England, I got inspired by a book the Observers Book of Manned Spacecraft, this was bought for me by my parents when I was about 7 (1966), I remember seeing the moon landings on TV, I also remember vividly coming home from school on a lunch-time and seeing the Apollo 17 Astronauts walking about on the moon. I was hooked, in those day there was virtually no 'news' on space, I joined an obscure group called The British Interplanetary Society and got good coverage through their monthly publication called 'Spaceflight' - I've followed all the missions since then, obvious highlights being the Viking Landings (which I remember the live coverage of Viking 1 landing) and the Voyagers. It's just great to be able to actually participate in these missions now that Doug has launched unmannedspaceflight.com

I visit USA on a regular basis for vacations, I've seen two Shuttle Launches (one night launch which I guess will never occur again), I've also visited Smithsonian, KSC on a number of occasions, JPL, Vandenber AFB, Edwards AFB and Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville.

I play golf (badly) and am into mountain and road biking as well as Go-Karts

[glennwsmith]

Brianc, thanks for the post on "Take a Moment" that prompted Doug to send you (and me) here.

As I was reading through the other bios, I began to think, "God, at 56, am I the oldest member?!?" Then I hit TTY's post.

And while in the mode of referencing other posts in this section:

Mr. Chemist, I laughed out loud about being a teenager for one billion years!

And Red Sky, I too had a 6" Dynascope, which my Mom sold years later to another budding astronomer.

The threads running through this thread are fascinating in and of themselves. I too am a former software engineer (author of BLAST [blocked asynchronous transmission], the first sliding window protocol in the asynchronous/mini/micro arena) now making $10/hr. as an engraver (with PC based equipment), but that's OK as my real focus is kinetic sculpture.

I live now in New Orleans but grew up in Baton Rouge, LA.

Our 5th grade class had a set of introductory guide books (papmphlets, really) to the various sciences, and I was thereby able to become aware that astronomy was my particular interest -- my first real interest, actually -- the type of budding fascination you can look back upon as defining who you are. So hence the Dynascope, and of course I followed avidly all the early space shots -- Sputnik, Vanguard (!), Explorer, Echo (THAT was a thing to see in the evening sky!), Mercury, and so on.

The Apollo landings were something of a climax for anyone alive at that time, and my interest subsequently got turned down a notch or two, but without ever really disappearing.

Then, of course, has come the huge recent explosion in space science, coinciding with 1) something of a lull in the biological sciences, what with Dolly and so on holding the headlines, and 2) the advent of the Internet (and this wonderful site) which, as many others have remarked, allow us to share the data, and our response to them, in near real time.

There's LOTS more I could say, but will close with this: I am thankful to be part of this online community.

[elakdawalla]

This seems to be the place for introductions, so here goes

I'm 30 and I work for The Planetary Society, doing whatever our fearless leaders ask me to do...which means I'm lucky in how varied my everyday job is. I cover space missions as "press," writing news stories for the website; maintain a weblog; write backgrounder material; run our various public involvement contests (art contests, guess the crater diameter, name the rovers, etc.); go on various enjoyable boondoggles, er, I mean, research trips; and do other stuff, like working as the image processing person in Cosmos 1 mission operations. (Too bad I never got any images to work on )

I love my job. I'm doing exactly what I set out to do when I went to graduate school -- help connect the "interested public" with what's currently going on in space research. Everybody wins; the scientists I talk to are grateful when anyone expresses interest in actually understanding their research (rather than focusing on endless debates like "What is a planet?"), and a small but devoted sliver of the public appears to love digging deeper into the science behind the latest discoveries.

What's struck me about reading the replies to this topic is the youthful mean age of the people reading and posting to this forum. The mean age of Planetary Society members is much older than that, over 50. Some general trends match, though; both respondents to this topic and Planetary Society members come from a broad range of professional backgrounds, with relatively few directly involved in aerospace research or industry; and both groups are, sadly, mostly male!

Emily

[4th rock from th...]

I've been on this forum for some time but never introduced!

So here goes:

I'm 28, live near Lisbon, Portugal, and presently work as a Webdesigner. I have a degree in Geography and worked for some time doing image processing with satellite images.
I'm also an amateur astronomer with a special interest on Mars ;-) (www.astrosurf.com/nuneshttp://www.astrosurf.com/nunes)

[ilbasso]

4th Rock, that is beautiful astrophotography on your website! Congratulations! It sounds like you have an observing site with remarkably good seeing.

[dilo]

4th Rock, that is beautiful astrophotography on your website! Congratulations!  It sounds like you have an observing site with remarkably good seeing.

Agree, planetary images are breathtaking and "Planetary Art" section is nice too!

[4th rock from th...]

Thank you for your kind words!

My site doesn't have that good seeing. There are some stable periods lasting a few minutes, usually just after sunset or at dawn. On general the weather is unstable with frequent fog and low clouds.

The trick is to use webcams or CCDs with very short exposure times on the best nights ;-) The rest is just carefull image processing.

[Harder]

Enjoying going thru all these bio's the least I can do is add my own..

'Alo 'alo, I'll say this only once to quote a famous European:

I'm also 53 yrs, and in very good company here by the looks of it.
I work in plants were we liquefy natural gas, and since these plants are typically far away from its customers (population centres & good infrastructure) I had to make do with initially Compuserve text-based space message boards over patchy telephone lines with V24 modems if memory serves me right.

My origin lies in Holland, and I am subscribing to the Dutch magazine Zenith and the French Ciel et Espace. I have been pestering them for information about what is going on behind the "Kremlin Walls" of ESA - no offence to Russian members here- and I'll keep at it as much as I can. If I land a scoop then this community will be the first to know - promise.

I chose my screen name as a throwback to the days I was in a university rowing club and I'll try to add a related logo shortly.

To end: when I followed the launch of the Messenger probe I realised it was going to enter Mercurius orbit exactly on my planned retirement day. That set me back for a few seconds, but space science & new discoveries goes day-by-day and that's the beauty of it!

Cheers,
Peter