Editor's note: The Eastern Echo staff meets regularly with interesting people on and off campus. Engage in those conversations with us through our Q&A reports.
Tom Kasper has been looking at the stars since a Christmas-wrapped telescope allowed him to see craters on the moon. Years later, as a part-time lecturer for the physics and astrology department at Eastern Michigan University, and as the EMU Planetarium operations coordinator, Kasper shares the night sky with students — sometimes using a much larger telescope at the university's Scherzer Observatory.
Q: How did you get into astronomy?
A: I was in grade school. There was a telescope under the Christmas tree one year, and it wasn't anything special, but it was enough to see some detail in the craters on the moon and to notice that there were rings on Saturn. That really piqued my interest.
I stayed kind of interested in it, but it wasn't until I arrived at Eastern as a freshman and saw the dome of Scherzer Observatory from a distance that I took my first astronomy class. I've been doing it pretty much ever since.
I took every astronomy class I could at EMU and participated in sessions at the observatory. Eventually, I became a student assistant in the physics and astronomy department for the rest of my undergraduate career. Then I was a graduate assistant in the department.
Eventually, I came back and have been a part-time lecturer for more than 10 years. It's really helped me to kind of keep that interest alive and keep myself current and then also be able to give back and share that with the students. Hopefully, they enjoy my level of enthusiasm because it really is just fun for me to do it.
Q: What exactly does astronomy entail?
A: If we kind of start at the beginning, it's a unique branch of science because it started as ... a little bit mysticism, a little bit religion, a little bit sorcery. Up until the past couple of hundred years, it really struggled to branch off and have its own identity as a legitimate part of science under the physics umbrella.
So, even today there are a lot of different areas of astronomy that we can study, whether it's visual or observational astronomy, actual looking and observing. Then there's the study of all the things we can't see and the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, not just radio astronomy, but X-ray and gamma ray astronomy and infrared and ultraviolet astronomy. We have lots of different orbiting telescopes, and Earth-based telescopes that can help us do that.
There are whole branches of planetary astronomy, people who are looking for and studying different types of planets. There's the theoretical astronomy; the people who are looking for and studying things like black holes and quasars and string theory and wormholes and all that science fiction-y stuff.
Then there are branches of gravitational physics, and since I've gotten involved, we've seen offshoots into astrobiology.
There's a special branch of biologists who are also trained astronomers looking for life out there. I think when most people say, oh, there might be life on this distant world. They're thinking like Marvin the Martian or something, but it's probably like a microbe or a bacteria or, or something that could potentially hurt us, but is totally benign otherwise. Space is harsh, a harsh environment, so we don’t have to worry too much about that.
But yeah, there's a ton of different specialties and subsections. I was giving a presentation at Ball State University in Indiana, and their specialty is studying binary stars. So, yeah, another unique branch of astronomy.
Q: What kind of classes do you teach?
A: I mostly just do astronomy 204, which is astronomical investigations. It's the laboratory class that is designed to accompany either the 105 or 205 lecture. What we try to do in that class is focus on about a dozen of the most important concepts and give the students some demonstrable qualities. We can simulate it, we can demonstrate it and we can observe it. So, we try to provide practical applications for astronomy. How do we find something in space? What are the different stellar coordinate systems? How does that relate back to latitude and longitude on Earth?
There's a practical application: The way we tell time is rooted in astronomy. Sundial. Great. We teach students to build their own sundial and then read them. So, our timekeeping system, all that stuff really is rooted back hundreds of years. And these carefully done astronomical calculations done by some of the first, what we call the first, modern astronomers.
I've also done some independent studies with students over the years. Then I do all the programming for the planetarium on campus, scheduling the shows and putting the shows together. I'll present a few shows this semester, but then we have some other folks who'll do that too. So, fun stuff for me for sure.
Q: How many other astronomy professors or lecturers are there?
A: I believe there's two full-time lecturers and probably like four part-timers, including me. I'm the only one who doesn't teach any physics though; I only do astronomy. It's a relatively small department, probably about 12 or 15 people in total.
Q: Do you find there's a lot of interest in astronomy for students? Has it gone up over the years or down?
A: One nice thing, I guess that's why I've been doing this for a while, is ... the astronomy classes will satisfy a general education requirement and knowledge of the disciplines. It tends to be a topic that most people see in the catalog and go OK, that looks like it could be fun. So, our lecture classes are typically around 37, because that's what we can fit in the planetarium. The labs are never more than 18. It's a nice kind of intimate class setting, where you can get into some detail and get into some content and the students get to know each other, and I can get to know them and do some demonstrations. I think the first time I taught this class was about 25 years ago.
There's always been a really good demand for it. People want to take it because even if somebody transfers in and they took an astronomy lecture class at Schoolcraft College or Central or Madonna or somewhere else, they probably didn't take a lab. In order for the class to transfer, they must take the lab. It's job security for a part-timer like me that just does it for fun. So, I try to make it as fun as possible for them.
Q: In terms of the lab classes, are you using telescopes? Do you have to wait for dark? What kind of things are you doing in that class?
A: The lab students will have opportunities to go up to the observatory, and we do have specialized equipment to observe the sun safely during the day. We have a couple different types of filters. One is a white light filter. It's basically like if you ever had a pair of eclipse shades for a solar eclipse; it's like that for a telescope, and it allows the viewer to see sunspots.
We have these other filters and a couple of telescopes that just look at hydrogen, which is what the sun is mostly made of. So, it's filtering out everything except this one teeny, tiny, little wavelength of hydrogen called the alpha line. That allows us to see solar flares and prominences. So that's something we can do during the day.
A lot of times, too, we can see the moon during the day, a couple hours before sunset. But we do have open hours led by the astronomy club, where students can go up and look through the different telescopes. Then there's some optional field trips that the astronomy club will host up to EMU's facility in Lapeer County, called the Kresge Environmental Education Center. They usually do a field trip in the fall and one in the winter. And we have a bunch of telescopes up there as well.
For my online students, I actually have a cool tool. It's a smart telescope. I can take one of these outside and set it up and control it with a phone or a tablet. Then they allow me to livestream whatever it's looking at over Zoom. So, I livestream the sun or the moon or a planet, if we have it. That's one way to make the online classes a little bit more interactive as well. This is kind of a new technology that everybody's getting all swept up in. And I'll tell you, on a night like tonight, the prospect of setting that outside and going upstairs and lounging around in my pajamas while it's doing all the work ... pretty cool.
Q: On the topic of technology, in terms of all the new stuff with AI and such, do you find that creeping into astronomy? Is that doing anything to help, anything to harm?
A: All the above. That's what I went down to Ball State to talk about, was smart telescopes and AI. So, these do use some, have some AI built in, to help you with finding objects and processing the images. That's a good thing. The other thing is we can use tools like any one of the large language models, like Gemini, which is the Google product, that we can get access through the university. I can tell the AI model where I'm at, what kind of telescope I'm using, and it can spell out a list of 10 objects I could observe that night. I might’ve seen all of that, what's something that's really obscure that I might have overlooked, and it’ll make some pretty good suggestions.
The bad thing is we're seeing people substitute AI for good, old-fashioned observation. They might, you know, just say, OK, you know, generate an image of the Andromeda galaxy, and they say, hey, look at what I did.
I don't think there's as much of that happening, but I think people will get confused. AI is not going to replace taking, you know, collecting six or eight hours worth of data and then doing the analysis. It's kind of a shortcut, right? It's like, OK, I'm not going to do all that. I'll just say, hey, give me the result. So that's the one danger I see. But I think it's going to be more helpful than anything.
The technology: I would say more has happened in terms of technological applications in reference to telescopes in the past decade than probably in the previous 400 years. That's pretty big. I know that's a bold statement, but I would stand behind it because, OK, lenses and mirrors, we've been doing that since the 1600s. We're pretty good at it. It's all this other stuff and fitting it in a package smaller than a purse or a shoe box or well, even smaller than a shoe or a radio or ... this book. That's pretty cool right there.
Q: What kind of career paths can you take by studying astronomy and what kind of degrees can you get? Is it specifically an astronomy degree or are there more specialized ones?
A: It depends on how serious you want to get. A lot of colleges and universities have full-blown degree programs in astronomy at the undergraduate, master's and doctorate levels. The University of Michigan is a great example. A lot of the other MAC schools have astronomy degree programs, as well as any major research school. Usually, you would get your specialization at the doctoral level because that's where you're going to do your thesis and your postdoc work.
But there's a lot of different pathways if you just want to be kind of working with it. Engineering, optical science, people who design and build the satellites and the telescopes, or ... any one of the astronomy-related branches of physics or chemistry or biology. There are a lot of different things you can do. I wouldn't say there's thousands of jobs out there, but there's so few people who actually go into it that they're not typically going to have issues finding a job. NASA, the Air Force, Space Force all have astronomers working on their staffs. There's a lot of jobs in academic work; a lot of jobs in research.
So it really just depends on what specialization. Big companies like Verizon might have a solar astronomer on staff wondering when is that next huge solar flare going to head toward Earth and interrupt wireless communications for a day or a week, or take a power grid down. It's sort of like meteorology. The places you wouldn't expect to find a weather expert, they're everywhere: airlines, the military, more than just on your favorite TV or radio station. So yeah, I would say the opportunities are almost limitless.
Q: In terms of climate change, does it intersect with astronomy in terms of the atmosphere and the sun?
A: Oh, yeah, absolutely. There's another branch of astronomy with space and atmospheric sciences. There are lots of crossovers, such as studying whether a decrease in the solar cycle will negatively affect our Earth. There have been some studies on solar flares and prominences and what these things we call coronal mass ejections might do to influence the atmosphere. All of that gets so interrelated between the biology, the ecology, the physics, the chemistry, the astronomy, not to mention just understanding the climate and the compositions of our nearest neighbors in the solar system. You know, determining if we could go to Mars and live there for six months or a year? Could we go to Venus? Well, the Soviets tried. Their probe basically melted and blew away after about an hour because it's just so nasty there.
Can we exist on the moon? Yeah, probably, but it's going to take a lot of resources to do that.
So, the more we understand all these other places, I think it adds to our understanding of our own home. I don't know if it's still true, but when I was growing up, they used to tell us we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean because it was actually easier to explore the moon than to get down there at that immense depth and pressure.
Q: So, this is a funny question, but kind of serious. Is the sun going to blow up?
A: Our sun, luckily for us, is about as average as you can get for a star. It's an average size, average color and average temperature. We are in what's called the Goldilocks zone, which for us is the perfect distance. Not too hot, not too cold — just right.
It could go a couple of different ways. At some point it's going to use up all of its hydrogen. Then it'll start fusing helium and other things and probably just burn out, but it'll slowly expand and get bigger. As it does that, it'll expand probably to the size Jupiter is, and that'll be billions of years from now. So, I don't have to worry about it.
But could it supernova? I don't know, maybe. But if it did, we'd only have eight minutes, so I wouldn't make any big plans. But the good news is we're still, a couple or 3 billion years away from any of that happening. So, I have a feeling Earth will look quite a bit different and we’ll have been long since replaced by the next best thing, a la the dinosaurs, probably.
Students interested in learning more about astronomy can check out the Physics and Astronomy Department's web pages for more information on classes and programs, visit the EMU Planetarium or join the university astronomy club.
