It’s my birthday this week, and a lot has happened in the past year! I have some exciting news to share, so I wanted to give a quick update on where I’ve been and what’s next for me.
First, I have two new academic publications in the works this year.
The first is a journal article about life at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in the late 1800s. It looks at the lives of teenage workers who did the grunt work of astronomy at the observatory as human computers. As you can imagine, these teenage youths got up to all kinds of hijinks, as people that age tend to do. It’s a great story, and I look forward to sharing it. A lot of the research for this article was done during my PhD program – these are the remnant historical anecdotes that did not make it into my dissertation, but were too cool not to publish somewhere. The article will likely be in the June issue of the British Journal for the History of Science.
The second publication is a big one: I wrote a book! It is due to come out this Fall and is titled ‘The Clocks are Telling Lies’ (McGill-Queen’s University Press). It tells the story of global standard time, and it is full of incredible stories. I can’t wait to share it, and I promise to provide more details in the coming months.
Finally, I’ve also begun doing some science communication work. This is a passion of mine, and it’s very exciting. Most prominently, I’ve written a few space and astronomy news articles for Universe Today. It’s a joy to work with them, and I’m excited to do more of it. You can see the first article here, which is all about new discoveries regarding Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, and NASA’s upcoming robotic mission to visit them, which launches later this year.
That’s all for now! Stay safe, be well, and look to the stars!