Erling Friis-Baastad: My Journey To The Exoplanets

With the printed word being such an essential component of my science inquiry, it’s not surprising that I launched into writing. Those stacks of thick 50-cent copies of text—Mr. Tribble’s Scientific Americans—provided a framework for a future career, if not quite the one I imagined for myself. By twelve, I wrote my first ‘book,’ a green spiral notebook I filled with comments on my observations through my telescope and with clippings from magazines and newspapers about astronomical activities of the past year. My proud stepmother packed the notebook around to the neighbours in the Virginia suburb. Soon she had something else to share with the other mothers in the cul-de-sac.

My name was published in Astronomy magazine and in Sky and Telescope, though all I’d done was submit a report of how a lunar eclipse appeared in Northern Virginia. Neither magazine published my reports, as I recall, just my name, along with the names of many others who had contributed observations. It was a start. I was thirteen. Publish or perish.