A here exists only in relation to a there, not the other way around.
There’s this only because there’s that; if we don’t look up, we’ll never know what’s down.
Paul Auster
Moon Palace
I have been fortunate to work with a wide range of activities centered on communication of astronomy to the public, with some of the best people in the profession.
Here is my own little Top-10 (or so) list of favourite achievements:
- Authoring the book The Hands-on Guide for Science Communicators, Springer New York, 2006, ISBN 0387263241.
- Co-authoring the book Lysfænomener i Naturen, Høst & Søn, 1998, ISBN 8714294621.
- Co-authoring the book Europe to the Stars — ESO’s first 50 years of exploring the southern sky.
- Leading the set-up of the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre 2013-2018 and raising funding for the first years of operation (2017-2018).
- Managing the conception and implementation of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (with Pedro Russo, according to UNESCO sources “the most successful [international] year so far”).
- Receiving the 2021 Klumpke-Roberts Award.
- Receiving the Tycho Brahe Medal in 2005.
- Setting up and implementing the merged ESO Outreach Department for ESO, ESA/Hubble, IAU and the ESO Supernova.
- Being one of the global communication leads of the Event Horizon Telescope campaign in 2019, coordinating the publication of humankind’s first image of a black hole.
- Reopening the Kitt Peak Visitor Center in 2023, after the pandemic and the Contreras Fire.
- Directing the movie Europe to the Stars.
- Directing the movie Eyes on the Skies – 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery.
- Directing the movie Hubble – 15 Years of Discovery as part of the big Hubble 15th Anniversary project.
- Being Director of Communication for International Astronomical Union in a period the IAU became more known than ever before due to the re-classification of dwarf planet Pluto. Read more about the work during this hectic period of the 2006 IAU General Assembly here.
- Co-authoring the book Hubble – 15 Years of Discovery, Springer New York, 2006, ISBN 0387285997 (also in Finnish, German, Portuguese, Chinese and simplified Chinese).
- Co-authoring the book Eyes on the Skies, Wiley 2009, (German, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Slovenian and Chinese).
- Co-authoring the book Hidden Universe (also in German, Japanese, Chinese, Finnish).
- Co-authoring the book Cosmic Collisions (also in German).
- Managing the Portal to the Universe project.
- Leading the lasershow Ambient LaserTrance in the Dome 1994 (co-production with Morten Rasmussen).
- Writing my Master’s Thesis: Compund Redshift Catalogues and their Application to Redshift Distortions of the Two-point Correlation Function. At one point in 1996 I had the largest collection of galaxy redshifts in the world…
- Leading the FITS Liberator project.
- Initiating the Hubblecast project.
- Leading the lasershow Beat the Visions 1993 (co-production with Morten Rasmussen).
- Initiating the Data2Dome project (incl. AstroCalendar).
- Initiating the ESOcast project.
- Initiating and managing Tripping on the Final Frontier, event for the 5th anniversary of Tycho Brahe Planetarium.
- Initiating the standardization AVM metadata project, that later became VAMP in a collaboration with Robert Hurt and Adrienne Gauthier
- Initiating the ESO and Hubble Hidden Treasures competitions.
- Leading the image processing work that helped bring the successful DKIST First Light image on the cover of NYT (above the fold). With Mahdi Zamani.
- Initiating ESO’s La Silla Total Solar Eclipse 2019 project and leading the webcast and image aquisition.
- Inventing the digital distribution strategies for ESA/Hubble and ESO making these organisations the first scientific organisation to freely distribute broadcast quality UHD videos and planetarium fulldome movies.
- Coordinating the implementation of the most sophisticated day- and night-time webcams at any observatory at several of ESO’s observatories (with the company APICAL).
- Being co-investigator and co-initiator of the ESO proposal to take the outreach images with the VLT and other telescopes in non-science grade weather.
- Working on the world’s first campaigns for the IAU to let the public name exoplanets and their host stars.
- Initiating the successful ESO astronomy camp and setting up the efficient ESO and ESA/Hubble internship programme where more than 100 interns have been trained.
- Coordinating the production of some of the largest astronomical gigapixel images (Jäger & Christensen, 2015).
- Raising more than 350,000 EUR over a 3-year period for the ESO Supernova.
