This Interview with historian El

KESSLER: I know from looking at your website a little of your educational background. You went to SUNY Albany in 1972, and then had the Master’s in Science and Communication from Boston University. Maybe we can back up a little bit. Just tell me the basics: where you were born, where you grew up, that sort of thing.

VILLARD: I grew up in Rochester, New York, and I think that that’s relevant to my career. Rochester is a high-tech town, especially when it comes to optics and photography. Of course it is known for Eastman-Kodak Company and home to Bausch and Lomb Optics. Everybody I grew up with were photography enthusiast . So when I was a kid my passions were photography, and astronomy. I thought astronomy was cool. And writing. . . So at an early age I was thinking about or exposed to all this stuff.

KESSLER: Were your parents connected with any of those things?

VILLARD: No they weren’t, but I will say my father was a big influence because he loved photography and astronomy We would set up a darkroom, and we looked at the stars through a small telescope

KESSLER: Oh, you had a darkroom at home?

VILLARD: Oh yes, we had a darkroom and that was a big thing when I was a kid. Also, One of my favorite memories is I went out with him and we looked for Sputnik. That was a huge deal. And I didn’t know why it was—I was only seven at the time.

I didn’t know why it was a huge deal because in the 1950s there were all these space books, and the Colliers Magazine series on space exploration, which I’m sure you can find in the National Air and Space museum. The books written by rocket pioneer like Werner Von Braun described how we would explore space, how we would launch astronauts. And I read all this. Between that and science fiction movies, I just thought space was exciting . I was addicted at a very young age.

So Sputnik went up, and I remember going out and looking up there and watching it pass overhead. Looking back that was really such a historic moment because the first manmade anything that would go around the Earth, and the news people were making a big deal out of it. So it’s a marriage of interest, because I thought the planets were cool, I thought it was fun looking through a telescope.

When I was a kid, the equivalent of the Hubble telescope was the giant Palomar Telescope that had opened about 1950. Everything you read was about Palomar, the largest telescope of its time. I even had a toy model. But that grabbed my imagination.

I had a little Child Craft book my mother bought and made sure I had the whole Child Craft series, and there was one book on technology, and the one page I would always go to, there was just two or three pages on astronomy. There weren’t many pictures back then and they were all black and white, but I can’t tell you the hours I would just go back to those pages. And in there were some pictures that were inspirational.

KESSLER: Do you remember which?

VILLARD: Yes. The Horsehead Nebula, and the planets like Saturn, and the Andromeda galaxy. The Horsehead, I would look at it. I think about it today, It is similar to what makes our Eagle Nebula so popular. the fact that it’s called a horsehead has an almost organic feel. You kind of think it’s alive, but it communicates an eeriness that you don’t think you can ever understand. That grabbed me at a very early age. So I had my favorite books on astronomy. But those pictures, playing with telescopes with my father, Sputnik, and the whole dawn of NASA and the space age really got me interested. But being on this project I find it interesting, because the parallel interest was photography and the power of the visual message, and filmmaking too.

KESSLER: Do you still practice photography?

VILLARD: Not as much as I wish I did. That’s the flipside. I like it, it’s so creative. It’s not on my resume, but I actually started out in school at the Rochester Institute of Technology as a photography major and I was going to go into photography. I had done some student films, I got awards on student films and they all had a science or space theme to them. I really wanted to be a communicator along those lines. In fact I was going to go to Boston University for film.

KESSLER: After you finished your B.A. you were going to?

VILLARD: Yes. My B.A. was communications. But BU had the science communication program, and this was at the height of the Apollo days, and I said, you know, there is going to be an exciting future in space with NASA. I wanted to be involved somehow, and I thought if I studied science journalism and science communication I could marry that with-- I love writing, but again, the visual is equally important.

So the first jobs after graduate school were I was an associate editor of Astronomy magazine. I lived up in Milwaukee for a few years, I loved it out there. Then I spent about 10 years in planetariums, which were fun. They are like having a giant electric train set because it’s like your toy universe. You’ve got all the stars. Planetariums back then, this was in the ‘70s, were turning very multimedia. Now today, they’ve all turned into video projections, but back then everything was slides and multi banks of slide projectors. But again, it was a chance to marry two interests—the whole visual communication, multimedia with an intriguing topic, which of course was what we are learning about the universe and traveling through space and all that.

i was at the planetarium here in Baltimore, Maryland Science Center, when I opened some trade magazine and there was an ad from Lockheed Aerospace and it was about Hubble. Hubble wasn’t even named Hubble then, it was just called the Space Telescope. But the ad said in 1983, humans may see to the edge of the universe, and I was awestruck by that idea, and I even cut out the ad and I pinned it over my desk.

And that mesmerized me about Hubble and the idea that we have reached this point where we could put a big telescope in space and with that, clearly you could do things you could never do before. Then when I heard the Institute was going to be here in Baltimore, I just kept nagging them until they hired me.

KESSLER: So you were hired before the launch?

VILLARD: Yes, I was here in 1986. I was just thinking about it this morning. Astronomy was boring until Hubble went up.

KESSLER: Why do you say that?

VILLARD: Well I’m thinking that I was here in 1986 when we were getting ready for launch.

KESSLER: That’s when you started, in ‘86?

VILLARD: Yes. I would keep track of what was happening, and the biggest thing back then (it just came over email yesterday), what were the big things in the 1980s? Well there was Halley’s Comet, there were the beautiful planetary missions to Uranus and Neptune and a supernova blew up, and that was a big deal; we are still photographing it. But beyond that I couldn’t tell you anything exciting in astronomy.

Now, after Hubble went up, I can tell you year by year all the exciting stuff that happened in astronomy, and I don’t mean to sound provincial, but Hubble really helped kick astronomy into high gear. When I say astronomy, I mean astronomy beyond the solar system because the marvelous NASA missions of the ‘70s and ‘80s that brought the solar system to life. You know, we landed on Mars in 1976. the 1980s was really the decade of reconnoitering the outer solar system, and that was tremendous for astronomy, but then Hubble was act two, because Hubble then took some of these powerful capabilities beyond to stars and to galaxies and quite literally towards the edge of the universe. I mean, I was busy from ’86 to ’90. I can’t tell you what I was doing, but I was busy. We were planning for launch, I was always busy But then Hubble went up and then things really kicked into high gear.

KESSLER: So let’s go back to the photography thing because I’d like to explore that a little bit more. What kinds of photographs did you take? What subject matter were you interested in?

VILLARD: I was fascinated with special effects photography. I mean, the movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” was truly seminal. That really, as much as the moon landings, that just got me all pumped up about space and astronomy and exploration. But then again it worked at two different levels. It was the excitement that one day we would do these things. but I was also excited how they had to use special effects cinematography to simulate space travel. by today’s standards that was ancient because that’s all optical effects, and kids today just don’t appreciate that. Today everything is the computer generated and you just hit some buttons and you can make a film like Jurassic Park. If you can imagine it, you can create it. But the techniques you needed to do cinematography and special effects were pretty tricky and very seat of the pants before the digital image days And I became a real student of that. So I loved photography and filmmaking from the point of creating imaginary places. Special effects. That was the thing that I really got off on. Looking back, I would love it, and RIT is the best film school in the country. I would love just going into the studio with the view camera and the lighting. It was my own little universe.

KESSLER: Why did you leave RIT?

VILLARD: It was a four-year program. I said, “I don’t feel like studying photography for four years.” I learned enough about it in the first year. I said, “Well, if I really want to be a photographer, I should just go work somewhere.” I really didn’t I needed the four years. And then I said, “You know, I really would like to do more liberal arts and just get more of a general education than stick on the photography track.” So it was a funny, kind of random walk. I mean, I wanted to do communication; I wanted to do visual communication, although I love writing, too, and the idea of science communication, it seemed like all this stuff could converge. And especially science communication as you would do in a museum, it’s not only writing, but it’s visual. At the planetarium we would do shows and I would play with all kinds of wild special effects, had tons of cameras. So again, it all kind of intertwined. But now I’ve got the best camera in the universe here.

KESSLER: Right! So were there particular people in film or film making that you were interested in their work? I mean, you mentioned 2001

VILLARD: Yes. I certainly became a disciple of Stanley Kubrick and Doug Trumball, the big special effects wiz that worked on 2001. I would follow those films and the special effects people and if it dealt with special effects or science fiction, I would follow it.

KESSLER: Were you interested in any other visual arts forms? Painting, sculpture, those more traditional things?

VILLARD: I would enjoy doing those in art classes. I’ve always thought I should take up painting just as something to exercise the right side of my brain or something. But the power of the image has always been-- When I was a kid there were some books I would just look at the pictures, I never bothered reading. You know, look at the pictures.

KESSLER: Do you remember what books those were?

VILLARD: I did have the Little Golden Book of Astronomy and I would just flip through that looking at the pictures. I don’t think I read that much in the book, but I loved the pictures. I think what makes me a good writer is that when I write about something, I think about it visually.

KESSLER: What does it mean to think about it visually?

VILLARD: As if I were writing an opening to a movie or a television documentary. I try to imagine a scene and then I try to describe that scene. But that’s just tied into the whole art of storytelling. But I’m a visual person first.

KESSLER: So when you do other things that are sort of non-visual like say listen to music, do you have visual experiences that go along with that?

VILLARD: Probably, but I can’t think of anything specifically. Although once I remember putting on, what else, Holtz’s Planets and really, some of that music is so eerie. Not Jupiter because that’s kind of bouncy, but I think Uranus. It was so creepy that I could imagine myself out there Actually this is probably creepier, if you are out here it’s cold, it’s distant, it’s empty. All that stuff.

I think parallel with all of that, and the biggest driver for me in astronomy is the burning question, which again fascinated me as a kid, is are we alone in the universe? I mean that is one of the most profound questions you can ever ask. You can ask, is there a God? But if there is, you’ll find out someday. But intelligent life is something that is within our technological grasp, and culturally people have thought about that for many, many centuries. But today, the impact of that would be so profound that on the intellectual side, it’s a question, I think about everyday. So every time I look at a Hubble picture, you are looking at these huge, vast areas of space, but it’s empty. And that’s a creepy feeling. Thomas Carlyle has a great quote, he says, “If space is inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly.. If the universe is uninhabited, what a waste of space.” Every picture you look at, the universe seems untouched. There was an astronomer, Ben Zuckerman, who said, “Every picture you look at, it’s untouched by the hand of intelligence.” Unless you believe in God, then you can say this is all God’s work. But if you are thinking of biological intelligence, all this incredible stuff, is lifeless, and I love that. It’s just a very eerie feeling.

KESSLER: So obviously the Hubble images have become incredibly important. When you came to the institute, was it expected that it would return this type of image?

VILLARD: No, that’s a really good point, actually. I came here intellectually excited about what the telescope might discover to look to the edge of the universe and in my mind I really wasn’t terribly imaginative about that. I figured, well, because I was staring at the pictures I saw in books, we’ll look, we’ll see all these galaxies, and we’ll take pictures of pretty nebulae. But I never imagined, number one, that they would look as weird as they do, and I never imagined that they would have the cultural impact that they do. And the pictures are so bizarre that if I saw some of these pictures in a science fiction movie, I would laugh and I would say, “Oh God, these guys, they are crazy. They’ve gone off the deep end.” Because I had, and I think most astronomers had a much more sedate view of the universe based on what you can see with ground-based. And the fact, I don’t think many ground-based, I can’t think of many colored pictures I’ve seen from ground-based telescopes. Hubble really I think made a big difference in terms of the use of colored pictures. And now all the great observatories are following us. But growing up there were a handful of classic objects, but colored pictures were rare.

But I did not imagine that some of the things we look at would be as strange and bizarre, and in some cases so geometric in a very eerie way. The universe likes to make disks and jets and so you see structures, like around a black hole or a star there will be a pancake of dust and there will be jets that are like an exhaust And the symmetry you see almost makes you religious. Even if you are not a religious person necessarily, you look at this elaborate structure, and it’s very humbling. I will say this project has humbled me tremendously. I feel I know less about the universe than I did when I got here. Because it’s a much bigger and more complicated place than I ever imagined.

KESSLER: That seems to me, for somebody who’s within the institute and dealing with the images and dealing with the astronomers and has a certain amount of knowledge about the information that the Hubble returns, and you have that sort of sense, it seems like, that creates a really big challenge as someone who then communicates that, “Here’s what Hubble is doing” to the public. How do you deal with that then?

VILLARD: That’s a daily worry, because these pictures need to be in context. That was really the key thing in the meeting last week. Somebody, I think Travis Rector, said, “You know you can show this blobby thing, but if you don’t see stars, you really don’t know.” And my worry with some of these pictures are too abstract. So I worry about putting a picture in a context, so that I really worry about a lay viewer. And it comes from all my experience with planetariums. I’ve taught introductory astronomy for 25 years, and I have that face-to-face experience with students or the general public. I think it helps tremendously because you get very sensitized to what turns them on intellectually. I just told somebody this no more than an hour ago. When when I teach introductory astronomy, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I treat my students as test particles. They are my focus group, and there are times I’ve taken Hubble pictures into class before they were published and just shown them to the class. I just want to see their reaction. I watch their faces.

KESSLER: So you are teaching at a college level, correct?

VILLARD: Yes. And what does this picture tell you? What does this mean to you?

KESSLER: What kinds of responses do you get? What kinds of things do people say?

VILLARD: Well the big thing of course with Hubble is, “Gee wiz, it’s stunning, it’s gorgeous. What is it?” Of course, “Are those colors real?” Which is a whole other thing. But it really strikes them. First is the “Gee wiz,” and then, “What’s going on in the picture?” and again, “Why is it all these weird colors?”

But the thing that’s amazed me here, too, is that I’ve gotten calls and email from people purely touched by the power of the image, and they don’t care about the science. I don’t mean to demean the science, but I would say for the public, our broadest base of interest is people that just like to look at the pictures. , you can go buy an Ansel Adams book, and you can look at these gorgeous pictures of the Grand Canyon, or whatever, and you may not have any interest in the geology of the Grand Canyon, you just think it’s a really cool thing to look at. So I think these images should be treated that way, but when I got here I never thought about the power of pure visual impact. I mean I knew we’d have pretty pictures, have pretty galaxies, but it went way beyond even what I imagined.

KESSLER: You talked about the strangeness and that these images almost inspire you with religious notions. Do you think the public has a similar feeling about the images?

VILLARD: Yes.

KESSLER: Do you get that from the students?

VILLARD: Yes. They are somewhat mystical. I could almost start a religion with these images. We were really bemused by this. It does strike people at a mystical level; it does strike some people at a religious level, the classic, which I’ve seen sometimes when people are looking at it, the Eagle. People went nuts over that, and I’m still trying to figure out why they went nuts. I think they were excited because, again, it looks organic. It almost looks like it’s living. When the Eagle was on CNN, people called in and said they saw the face of Christ, and I was really taken aback by that. I said, “You know, this is really resonating at this emotional, visceral, and mystical level.” And that’s good because at that level it engages the public in thinking about a larger universe than the daily universe.

One of the most sobering calls I got was from a lady in California who was a nurse and she wanted that particular picture. And at first I thought she was some kind of cult person, and she said, “Look. I’m not interested in astronomy,” she says, “My husband subscribes to Sky and Telescope magazine” she says, “I’m flipping through his magazine and I saw that picture,” and she says, “it changed my life.” . She says, “Oh, I work in a hospital and I have to deal with life and death, but it made all these problems seem little when I began to realize how big the universe is The biggest power of something like Hubble to me is to inspire, just like when I was a kid I looked at those Horsehead Nebula pictures, and it’s to inspire. And I think sometimes on this project people get too preoccupied with education because that’s sacrosanct. This meeting I was at, at the tail end of last week someone said “You’ve got to put an astronomer in every classroom. You’ve got to train more scientists.” Well, if one picture can inspire somebody to get a book or go on the web and learn something about the universe even if they do it for a day or a week or whatever, I think it’s sort of a really powerful purpose. I don’t think every picture has to train a new astronomer (there are enough astronomers), but to open up the imagination. I think really the power of this telescope, it has surpassed the stuff they dream up in Hollywood. I mean I go to movies now and I can almost tell you what pictures from Hubble they looked at and tried to emulate.

KESSLER: Really?

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contact me at rvillard@gmail.com