The Making of
Baltimore is a growing city with one of the leading Universities in the USA - Johns Hopkins. We stayed in a hotel near to the harbour, where the restaurants and museums are to be found. We spent most of our first day (a Sunday) in the Maryland Science Centre where the Hubble Space Telescope has its own exhibition and a planetarium and Imax cinema with specialist astronomy shows.
Baltimore's other most famous sons are the Orioles. We thank Baltimoreans John and Abbott Connolly for giving us a pair of prime seat tickets.
Johns Hopkins was a 3 mile bus or taxi ride north of the city.
The STScI is housed in a building on the edge of Johns Hopkins' campus.
We were given an office for the week. Working on our laptops, we often emailed each other photos and copy from one side of the office to the other - it probably bounced off a couple of geostationary satellites and went via Japan to get four feet!
Professor Nino Panagia, the ESA Senior Astronomer at STScI, spent hours illuminating us about many aspects of astrophysics which has greatly helped the overall scientific quality of SOS.
Hubble Heritage team member Lisa Fratarre also spent a great deal of her valuable time helping us. One of the most surprising stories she told us was how one of the most famous HST pictures came about. The reason that 'Hoag's object' has an HST portrait is not because of some amazing scientific theory. The reason is that during a drink with an old boyfriend, he mentioned that Hoag's object would be a really cool thing to image. Lisa agreed that the public would certainly appreciate a picture of such an unusual galaxy - so here it is!
Most of our week at STSci was spent interviewing scientists, writing up the draft challenges and then going over them with the scientists to check for accuracy. The overall plan for the challenges changed from a third person approach to writing the challenges as though were written by the scientists themselves. This was only possible by working so closely and with follow ups via email when we returned.