I first became interested in the stars in the summer of 1962, when I was 6 years old and the family did a camping trip around Lake Superior. Late one night on that trip, I woke up, went outside the tent, looked at the sky and was astonished by the beauty of the stars.
I joined a local astronomy club in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1967. It was the Apollo era and I was totally enthralled by the idea of space exploration. But, in 1971 one of my high-school teachers told me that the Apollo era was ending as there were too many poor and starving people in America for the government to be able to continue spending a huge fraction of its budget on NASA. I moved on to other things. Years passed. Decades passed.
I did a BS in Chemistry at RPI and a PhD in Applied Math at Cornell. I then did a few postdocs before taking a ``permanent'' position at AT&T Bell Labs' Math Research Center in Murray Hill NJ. In 1990, Princeton University lured me away from Bell Labs. I've been at Princeton ever since.
In 1999, I learned that a friend of mine (who worked down the hall) was an active amateur astronomer. He told me that he was the director of the local amateur astronomy club. I expressed interest and asked the name of the club. He said it was the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton. He invited me to join him at a star party to which he was planning to bring his 7" Questar telescope. I went to that star party. The views of Jupiter through his telescope were awesome. A month later I bought myself a 3.5" Questar. A year later, I transitioned from visual observing to astrophotography.
On Nov. 12, 2001, I went to a dinner talk at Forbes College (here at Princeton). The title of the talk was "Terrestrial Planet Finder: Detecting and Characterizing Earth-like Planets Orbiting Nearby Stars". The speaker was Ed Turner. The talk was very interesting. It inspired me to work on the high-contrast imaging needed to take pictures of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. From that day up until now I have been actively collaborating with my colleagues in Astro and Aerospace Engineering on designing a NASA space telescope to image Earth-like planets.
I've also remained an active astrophotographer. In 2005, I bought myself a Takahashi FSQ-106N and a 10" Ritchey-Chretien telescope from RCOS. I've had the pleasure of taking many astro photos from the driveway at my house here just 8 miles north of Princeton.
Lastly, I've also co-written two astronomy books. The first one, "Sizing Up The Universe", was written with J. Richard Gott and is published by National Geographic. The second one, "Welcome to the Universe in 3D" was written jointly with J. Richard Gott, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Michael Strauss. It was published by Princeton University Press in April, 2022.