Eckhart Spalding

Here is the video recording of my talk “Seeing the Light: Hunting for solar systems like our own,” part of the University of Notre Dame’s public science talk series Our Universe Revealed.

Abstract: A group of astronomers recently carried out a survey of nearby stars, called the “Hunt for Observable Signatures of Terrestrial Systems.” The survey used the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to measure the faint signals of dust around stars and provide the first realistic hints of discovering Earth-like planets around other stars using future space-based missions. Postdoctoral researcher Eckhart Spalding, who participated in the survey, will describe the adventure, the innovation, the science, and the future implications of this pioneering survey.

My mom and I have translated one of the oldest published accounts of the Maasai. It is the article “A short description of the Masai and Wakwafi tribes in southeast Africa” which appeared in the journal Das Ausland (Abroad) in 1857. The author was Johann Krapf, a missionary who lived in a village inland from Mombasa from 1846 to 1853. From there, he made a number of travels deep into the East African interior in what is now Kenya and Tanzania. He was the first such traveler, native or foreign, to write a detailed and lengthy first-hand account of the East African interior, which was published in 1858 in the two-volume set Reisen in Ost-Afrika (Travels in East Africa). (Krapf also holds the distinction of being the first person to ever mention the Maasai in writing at all, in a letter from 1846.)