By Maggie Masetti

September 8, 2014

Comments Off on Neil deGrasse Tyson Pays a Visit

While in DC for a Cosmos screening, a simple email from the James Webb Space Telescope team was all it took to get Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (astronomer, Hayden Planetarium director, and general advocate for science) to come by NASA Goddard for a visit.

It was truly exciting to meet him and to get the chance to hear him talk and tell stories. He had interesting insight on being a public speaker about astronomy. Early on in his career, he had done an interview for a news report, and had thought he had done a good job explaining accretion disks, and when he watched the news segment, it was massively cut down to basically him just him gesturing, doing an imitation of an accretion disk.

After this, he decided to train himself to talk in sound bites. He came up with a whole slew of astronomy topics, and then three small bits about each one. A hook, something funny, a fact, etc. The next time he was interviewed, they didn’t cut his sound bite down, because he’d already done it for them, but in a calculated way.

Obviously he’s become very in demand for this, for being able to distill things down without dumbing them down.

Here are some photos of his visit.



Telling stories to the James Webb Space Telescope team in front of the cleanroom window:

Asking questions of Dr. John Mather, about the sunshield. Even as he asked questions about the mission, you could tell that he was, in his head, trying to pull interesting facts out that he could use later.

Getting a tour of our Integration & Test facilities:

View the full set on Flickr.

All photos credit: NASA/Goddard/Rebecca Roth