For Observatories Alumnus Douglas Duncan, Public Outreach is One of the Best Parts of the Job
Carnegie Science’s postdoctoral fellowships have long stood as one of the world’s premiere springboards for young scientists. Alumni have gone on to lead renowned research institutions, define new disciplines, and earn some of science’s highest honors. But perhaps no Carnegie postdoc alumnus has inspired as many space lovers and amateur astronomers as Douglas Duncan, who spent the first two years of the 1980s at the Carnegie Science Observatories and went on to develop planetarium programs that have reached hundreds of thousands of curious minds.
Duncan has logged more than five decades of educational experience, a track record he initiated well before first joining the Observatories as a student research assistant in 1972. His career exemplifies Carnegie’s hallmark nimbleness, not only in the evolution of his research interests, but in the wide range of responsibilities he’s held as scientist, teacher, educator, and administrator. Ever the innovator, he’s connected the public with astronomy across both radio and ocean waves, planetarium ceilings, eclipse-darkened paths of totality, most recently, smartphone screens.
“I have always felt very fortunate to be in astronomy because it’s one of just a very few sciences you can count on your fingers that people just naturally find fascinating and love,” Duncan says. “A lot of people have astronomy as a hobby, partly because of the beauty of the nighttime sky, but it’s also a little more philosophical. You look at all those stars and for centuries people have wondered, ‘could those stars have planets? Could there be other life out there?’”
A Southern California native, Duncan capitalized on the region’s prowess as a hub for innovative astronomy. After meeting a Jet Propulsion Lab scientist during a summer science program in Ojai, Duncan pursued a bachelor’s at Caltech and worked as a ticket-taker at the Griffith Observatory in his free time, hoping the opportunity would lead to a chance to become a planetarium show presenter. After one educator’s temporary illness initially opened that door, he quickly proved himself worthy of a regular weekend slot.
Duncan’s gregariousness also brought him face to face with astronomers at the Carnegie Observatories, which is based a few blocks from Caltech in the shadow of the historic Mount Wilson Observatory. He went door-to-door on the Observatories’ campus, seeking undergraduate research opportunities and, after spending a summer at Big Bear Solar Observatory, he accepted an assistant position with Observatories Director Emeritus George Preston. Preston set Duncan to work analyzing data from a double star system, which fostered an interest in stellar astronomy that he carried to UC Santa Cruz, where he pursued his doctorate. There, he met Olin Wilson, a Carnegie astronomer on sabbatical who offered weekly seminars. One program focused on the search for sunspots on stars other than the Sun piqued Duncan’s interest and became the subject of his doctoral thesis.
By the time he published his dissertation, a core group of scientists at Carnegie were exploring the same topic, and they awarded Duncan a fellowship to work among them. When a number of colleagues were rallied to combine their allotted observing time at Mount Wilson into 90 consecutive nights dedicated to sunspot cycle tracking, Duncan saw the true power of the Carnegie model for the very first time. Their collaborative effort enabled the discovery of sunspot-like activity cycles in other stars and revealed that stars lose momentum as they age.
“Carnegie has always been important, and continues to be important,” says Duncan. “With its private sponsorship of research, it gives people the maximum flexibility to be creative and to try new things. Imagine starting out on a project where you don’t anticipate any results for a decade. Most universities would not smile on that or give you tenure. The freedom and flexibility Carnegie affords its scientists is very, very important.”
Duncan’s time at Carnegie also coincided with the early years of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Today, Carnegie astronomers routinely travel to LCO and use remote observing capabilities, but in the 1980s, travel to the new observatory was far more arduous. Astronomers and LCO staff communicated via short wave radio, and Duncan was one of several Carnegie postdocs who took Spanish classes at Pasadena City College to make communication between the dispersed teams easier. Of all the places he’s traveled, including basecamp at Mount Everest, Duncan counts the Atacama’s skies as the most extraordinary.
After concluding his Carnegie fellowship, Duncan became a Research Associate, then joined the staff of the Hubble Space Telescope as a specialist in UV spectroscopy. The professional transition also brought a new research interest in the ancient stars that survived the Milky Way’s collapse, but as six years passed working for Hubble, Duncan increasingly missed the teaching opportunities he enjoyed at UC Santa Cruz and the Griffith Observatory. For a while, he scratched the itch to bring astronomy to the public by leading eclipse excursions to Mexico and beyond, a project he continues to this day—he’s even designed an app, Solar Snap, to help take better eclipse photos on iPhones and Androids. But when a particularly successful viewing on a cruise ship in the early 1990s resulted in an opportunity to focus on outreach more fulltime, he took the plunge.
Planetariums were undergoing a revolution at that time thanks to new technology that made it possible to visualize phenomena in the deep universe. The leaders of Chicago’s famous Adler Planetarium were eager to capitalize on these emerging opportunities and presented Duncan with a proposal: with a hundred staffers and $60 million, could he help bring Adler into a new era? Duncan agreed, negotiating to spend half of his time on research with a joint appointment at the University of Chicago and the other half on the planetarium’s transformation. He was one of the leaders when Adler finally went digital.
With that experience under his belt, Duncan left Chicago for Boulder, where the University of Colorado was eager to modernize its Fiske Planetarium. At Fiske, he encouraged academic colleagues from other departments to use the facility’s projection capabilities and hired a video producer to develop better shows and render sharper images of cosmic objects that could be used on a wider scale. Today, programs Duncan developed are shown in nearly 1000 theaters worldwide, an extraordinary impact that doesn’t even account for the years of science programming he presented on public radio stations like Chicago’s WBEZ during his time in the city.
But Duncan’s passion for science communication—and particularly the need to train astronomers in engaging with the public—crystallized among his fellow researchers. As an education coordinator for the American Astronomical Society, he conducted a survey that found half of respondents had no training on how to communicate scientific topics to non-scientists.
It’s already too late to teach a postdoc how to communicate, he says, insisting that professors and universities should require science communication courses as core components of undergraduate and graduate school curriculum. While some scientists are natural, confident communicators, many are not, and better communication skills would additionally benefit scientists hoping to learn from their colleagues at conferences, he adds. Without the opportunities to hone his skills in crash courses like presenting shows at the Griffith Observatory, or a separate experience presenting about Halley’s Comet to cruise ship passengers during his Carnegie fellowship, who knows what kind of career he would have built?
More than 200,000 students in the United States take an astronomy course each year, according to Duncan, and though he only trains a fraction of them, his advice to all is the same: “Don’t be fearful.” Of course he means in pursuing opportunities—going door to door asking for jobs isn’t necessarily required—but also in meeting the material where it is, and connecting it to the human experience.
“We ought to be teaching respect and understanding of the universe,” he says. “We influence the whole planet, so let’s be careful.”
His educational efforts, both in and out of the classroom, are something of a civics education too.
“The scientific method is powerful, not just for scientists but for anyone who needs to evaluate their own choices in medicine, in climate—things that affect us all,” Duncan says. He devotes a significant amount of time to scientific discernment, which he feels can help the public better identify truth and fact in all manners of news and information. “It’s critical to teach people how to tell real science from fake science or conspiracy.”
“Science affects everybody, whether you’re a scientist or not, and science policy affects all the scientists,” he says. “So when scientists take a little bit of their time and go out and talk to the public, I think that’s hugely important.”
At the end of the day, the impact of Duncan’s work remains rooted in the wonders of the cosmos. Sharing what he’s learned about the universe at Carnegie and beyond is awe-inspiring for him and his students.
“I can’t tell you how many times people have looked through the telescope, seen Saturn’s rings, and gasped,” he says.
