Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 13, 1991 TAG: 9104130531
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA BRENNAN/ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Two weeks ago a National Research Council panel called for a $3.02 billion government investment in astronomy in the 1990s. In the works: infrared telescopes that could provide astronomers with pictures of some of the universe's most mystifying secrets, including black holes that gobble stars, the evolution of other solar systems, the structure of powerfully bright quasars and the birthplaces of stars and planets.
College students are enrolling in greater numbers, and Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution in Washington reports that a Saturday science school for inner-city children has proved successful.
So PBS's "The Astronomers," a six-part series opening Monday (at 8 p.m. on WBRA-Channel 15 in the Roanoke viewing area), may find an audience. The series is packed with impressive computer imagery and scored with original music.
Narrator Richard Chamberlain gives viewers all sorts of facts and figures as the series visits observation sites around the world. The viewer learns a lot about astronomy, thanks to a $5.3 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, the largest ever given to a single series in PBS history.
By title, the series purports to introduce some of the English-speaking scientists who try to figure out what's up there.
Among those in the opener is Rubin, who marked 26 years at the Carnegie Institution this month, a member of that select group of thinkers who spends her time trying to solve the mystery of the universe's "dark matter."
"There is a very small, permanent staff of less than 15," she said. "When they hire you, they leave you alone to do your work. There just is no better place."
The mother of four children, all with Ph.D.s, she is interested in the science education of youngsters and in helping women who are interested in astronomy.
But at Coolidge High School in the District of Columbia, in 1945, she was almost alone in her interest in astronomy. Her father, an engineer, accompanied her to meetings of the Amateur Astronomy Society, uneasy that his young daughter was there among older participants, mostly men.
When she told her physics teacher she had a college scholarship, he advised her to major in anything but science.
"It was a very macho class," she recalled. "He was great friends with all the boys. I had built a telescope, and I had known for years I wanted to be an astronomer, but he was unaware of that. And there was no way to talk with him."
Rubin graduated from Coolidge in 1945 and went to Vassar, married, followed her husband to Cornell and eventually earned her doctorate from Georgetown University. Today she is one of the 12 percent of women in the American Astronomical Society and tries to help women interested in the field.
Rubin and her husband, a theoretical biophysicist now working at the National Institutes of Health, shared duties as the parents of four children.
"The children always had two parents," she said. "I did not do any serious (astronomical) observing until my oldest was 13 and the youngest was 3, and then he took care of them. I have a very good husband."
In "The Astronomers," Rubin is shown with a group of third-to-fifth-grade children at Carnegie's Saturday-morning science school at the agency's headquarters. The program was started by Carnegie president Maxine Singer, with Rubin on its advisory board.
"Initially, the school was open to anyone who could walk there," Rubin said. "We turned a room into a laboratory and hired a teacher, Charles James, a science teacher at a local private school."
by CNB