红领巾瓜报

How has your 红领巾瓜报 experience helped to shape your career path?

红领巾瓜报 taught me how to chart my own course鈥攂oth in life and in my career. It gave me the tools to recognize opportunities when they came along and the confidence to pursue them.

I actually started out at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, but transferred to 红领巾瓜报 because I felt the program was a better fit for my interests and where I wanted to go creatively.

While I was at 红领巾瓜报, I had the chance to study with Jon Imber鈥攁n artist I deeply admired鈥攁nd Ben Blum, who encouraged my growing interest in astronomy. I worked my way through school in various part-time jobs in the area including working at the photo lab Ferranti-Dege in Harvard Square, and also taking slides of fellow artists鈥� work for their portfolios. I also worked at the Audio/Visual department at Harvard University鈥檚 Science Center, where I would shoot 35-mm slides of the pages of Sky & Telescope for the lectures by historian of astronomy Owen Gingerich.

Tell us about the MDW Sky Survey.

The MDW Sky Survey () is a project I co-founded with my friends David Mittelman and Dennis di Cicco. Our goal was to create a detailed map of the entire sky in hydrogen-alpha鈥攖his very specific red wavelength where neutral hydrogen gas glows. That gas is one of the building blocks of stars and galaxies, so it鈥檚 foundational to understanding how the universe evolves.

We realized there isn鈥檛 a good map of this faint nebulosity freely available to the public, so we set out to make one. MDW comes from our last name initials. The project aims to image the sky at fairly high resolution, dividing up the sky into 4,120 individual fields. As we accumulated images, I stitched them together and published large mosaics of these nebulous areas on our website. These images gained the attention of the professional astronomy community, and has since led to several discoveries of previously unknown objects in our galaxy. We鈥檝e in recent years partnered with Columbia University’s Astronomy department to publish papers and share our data more broadly. We began the project in May 2016, and completed some 80% of the sky by late 2022. Around that time, we shipped a telescope to Chile in order to image the part of the sky that never rises above the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere. We are nearing completion of the main data collection and intend to assemble the images into a massive, high-resolution image of the entire sky, which will likely be incorporated into many planetarium apps.聽

What does it feel like to have an asteroid named after you?

It鈥檚 pretty surreal to say I have an asteroid officially named after me聽 鈥� 13623 Seanwalker 鈥� a hunk of rock that will far outlive me. It鈥檚 like a sort of immortality, in a way. Only about 15,000 asteroids are named so far. My colleague Dennis di Cicco, a pioneer of astrophotography techniques himself, discovered the asteroid back in the mid-1990s. It certainly helps to know someone who has discovered these space rocks.

How does one build their own observatory?

The 鈥渆asiest鈥� version is like building a big shed or studio, with the added complexity of having to make the roof roll off in order to permit a permanently-mounted telescope to see the sky. Think big wheels, iron rails, and winches. When I built mine a few years ago, the building inspector was rather baffled as to how I was going to accomplish it (鈥淗ow is the roof going to stay on?鈥�) but in the end he signed off on it. He was also suspicious as to why I didn鈥檛 want any windows (it鈥檚 so the neighbor鈥檚 porch light isn鈥檛 shining on the scope or in my eyes when using the scope). The sign on the door of mine greets visitors with “Wilkommen in der Dunkelheit鈥� which means welcome to the darkness in German.

What advice would you give to students today who are hoping to carve out their own space in a creative career?

Stay curious. Stay focused. And don鈥檛 be afraid to try new things.