Head in the Stars

Astronomer Dr. Scott Fisher witnesses the beauty of space through telescopes, pondering our place among the cosmos.

Courtney Brown

The infinite void of the sky is without a doubt one of the most terrifying and amazing things any of us will ever see. Looking up to see the whole universe complete with constellations and planets dotted across the night sky has captured the attention of humans throughout our existence. The stars have been mapped and recorded by nearly every culture across the globe and have guided the way to new places and back home again.

Even though Dr. Scott Fisher was a self described “sciencey kid,” he never imagined he would be an astronomer. He wanted to build things, to be an engineer. When Fisher was a child he built a dam in the creek behind his grandparents’ house. It worked so well that it flooded the backyard and he had to tear it down. Fisher says he did things like that all the time, he couldn’t help himself. His desire for discovery has always taken precedence.

During his last year of college, his friend convinced him to take an astronomy course, claiming it was supposed to be an easy class. Fisher explains, “it was like my brain exploded.”

He ended up staying an additional year and added a second major, astronomy, on top of physics. Dr. Fisher realized he “could study physics, but in a really interesting sort of way and apply it to the sky and on top of that you get to build telescopes and cameras and things like that.”

In grad school, while working to get a PhD in astronomy, Dr. Fisher and a team of peers built Oscar, an infrared camera meant to be used with telescopes. Oscar was the first camera to see some of the discs around nearby stars that our solar system emerged from. They also saw young stars and infant solar systems. Fisher and team traveled the globe to experiment on the biggest telescopes with Oscar, visiting places like Chile, Spain, and Hawaii.

Fisher says about their discoveries, “[it] was pretty cool to be the first human being to be able to see those things.”

After graduating from the University of Florida, where he spent both his undergrad and graduate years, Dr. Fisher found a job in Hilo, Hawaii, home of the north half of the Gemini Observatory (the southern half is located in Chile). Built in 1999, each location has a 8.1-meter telescope, earning them the places of 12th and 13th largest telescopes in the world. Dr. Fisher describes them as “monster telescopes.” During his 12-year stay at Gemini, Fisher began speaking to groups of people about astronomy. This sparked an interest in public outreach about science that has helped to guide Dr. Fisher’s career.

After Gemini, Dr. Fisher accepted a temporary position at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC, where he had $15 million in grant money, funding various astronomy projects and education-related scholarships. As he was getting ready to move back to Hilo, Fisher saw that there was an open position at the University of Oregon. He now teaches 100 level astronomy courses and is the director at the Pine Mountain Observatory.

Dr. Fisher says,“that to me is just the perfect combo. Do some teaching and student development, but also get to work with telescopes and hands-on stuff.”

Pine Mountain Observatory is located about 30 miles east of Bend in the Deschutes National Forest, at an altitude of 6,300 feet, perfect for observation of the sky. The observatory was established in 1967 and it’s one of the last observatories connected to a university in the United States. Its first telescope was built in 1952, and

Dr. Fisher says, “it’s an antique, honest to God, antique. And we have it working, even better than it did back in the fifties.”

Dr. Fisher loves taking his students up to the observatory to work on various projects and observe the stars as they twinkle in the vast, dark sky. His favorite project involves looking at the light curves of asteroids that orbit our solar system between Mars and Jupiter. Looking at the way light reflects off the rocks allows for the size to be calculated.

“The sunlight goes out, hits the rock, and then comes back and hits and reflects into our telescope,” says Fisher. “We can sort of measure how the brightness of these asteroids change. And we call that a light curve.”

Asteroids come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are constantly spinning and tumbling around in space. Dr. Fisher described them by saying “they’re actually shaped a little bit more like potatoes and some of them [are] even peanut shaped or look like a leg bone or something, you know, they’re not spheres.” He has his students analyze the images and then he sends the data to the University of Kobe in Japan. The university has a special software that will look at the light curves and create a 3D image of the asteroid. A recent asteroid he observed was about 30 miles across. Fisher described it as “a rock as big as two times Mount Hood and 200 million miles away.”

Similar to the asteroid project, Dr. Fisher uses light to learn about exoplanets. As the planets orbit their solar system, the amount of light the star gives off as the planet passes in front of it can be measured.

“If a little planet orbited right in front of it, it makes the star look a little dimmer and smaller,” Fisher explained. To observe the brightness of the star, they take one picture every minute and watch as it changes. This allows them to discover things like size and shape, orbiting patterns, and how far away the planet is from its star.

Another project he and his students are working on, the Pine Mountain Deep Field, uses one of the telescopes to observe the center of a galaxy cluster. A picture taken by the Hubble telescope shows over 1,500 galaxies in various stages of development. Dr. Fisher and his students have observed the same spot for over nine hours. So far they have detected, in Fisher’s words “400 Milky Ways in just this one picture.” Considering the telescope they’re working with is significantly smaller than one of NASA’s prized telescopes, this is an impressive feat.

Dr. Fisher says, “I feel that the direct connection with the universe is extremely important. It’s a presence in all our lives.” He admits astronomy is a “quirky subject,” something so embedded in our lives that in some ways we are all astronomers. “It’s really easy to feel tiny and insignificant when you study the stars. They’re so far away and so big and so much grander than we are. But at the same time, we are connected to the universe in extremely strong ways.”