Big Southern Skies

A new observatory on a mountaintop in Chile equipped with the world’s largest digital camera will dramatically change the way we see the universe. 

And when that camera starts generating 20 terabytes of new data each night, Erin Howard will be among the first to learn what’s revealed by the new telescope at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. 

Asteroids? Supernovae? Dwarf Planets? Even the hypothetical Planet Nine?  

“I’m going to try very hard to be one of the first ones to see it,” says Howard, ’22, B.S., mathematics/computer science and physics. “I will at least be in the Slack channel of the first one to see it.” 

Howard is a research scientist at the University of Washington and a member of the Rubin Observatory Data Management Team testing the software “pipeline” that will help scientists analyze the massive troves of data and images soon to be streaming from the telescope. 

“Data comes in the pipeline and science comes out of the pipeline,” they say. “I take data that already exists and is pretty well-studied, and I put it into our software pipelines. It sounds entirely boring--and it is--except when something exciting happens.”

A lot of excitement is expected out of the Simonyi Survey Telescope at the Rubin observatory once it comes online in 2025. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time will take scientists a decade to explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy, map the Milky Way, create an inventory of the solar system and explore how objects in space change position or brightness over time. 

Other telescopes focusing on small areas of the sky, or “deep drilling fields,” Howard says. But the Rubin telescope’s massive size will also allow for a much larger field of study.

“It will survey the entire night sky in Chile every three days,” Howard says. “Every time it takes a picture of the same area, it kind of stacks it and compares things. When you stack images on top of each other, lights stack on lights, and things that are very, very faint, that you would never see in a single snapshot, start coming to life.”

Howard expects the coming years will reveal new stars and galaxies. “We’re going to be cataloging and documenting so many brand-new supernovae, that catalog is going to – pun intended – explode.” 

But they also expect we’ll see some eye-popping sights relatively nearby: “There are objects in our solar system that are just too faint for us to see with our current technology.” 

Howard seemed bound for a career in science at an early age, but their accomplishments are hard-won. They graduated from high school in Bremerton in 2007 and immediately headed to an intensely competitive private college out of state to study physics and astronomy. 

But the experience was disastrous. A bright kid who had always relied on their stellar testing abilities, Howard struggled mightily in college with untested study skills combined with undiagnosed autism, ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorder. They soon dropped out, confused and hurt. 

Howard came home to take classes at Olympic College, but found mixed success there, too. Soon their aunt helped them find a job doing data entry – which turned into decent work testing websites and software. 

It was “a nice little bubble,” Howard says. But it wasn’t enough. 

“I had all this desire to do something with my life,” they say, “and no outlet.” 

Then about a decade ago Howard attended a presentation in Bremerton by the Rubin Observatory data team and immediately saw how the telescope would change the way we see the cosmos. Howard was ready to answer the Rubin team’s call for people to help build software to process all that data so that humans can focus their analytical energies on the most interesting things in in the southern skies. 

“I said, ‘I’m going to work there.’”

Now with a goal, Howard re-enrolled at Olympic College, retaking several classes to polish up their GPA with plans to transfer to WWU. 

By then, they had spent a decade in the workforce – and they knew about their disabilities and how to advocate for themselves. 

“I treated school like my job,” Howard says. “If I wasn’t given the appropriate tools to do my job well, I had a discussion with my manager, aka my teacher.” 

At Western, Howard was immersed in research projects, working closely with Professor Kevin Covey, using machine learning in his work studying spectra, exploring the brightness, color and temperature of starlight.  

Soon Howard was up for a Research Experience for Undergraduates project through the Computing Research Association, but the organization didn’t have a mentor in the field Howard was working in. So Howard found their own in James Davenport, a former post-doctoral researcher at Western who is now a research assistant professor at UW. 

Howard worked with Davenport for two summers studying eclipsing binaries, pairs of stars that orbit each other and block each other from our line of sight. They were among the first to use the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite to create a catalogue of eclipsing binary star systems. Howard graduated in 2022 as the Presidential Scholar of the College of Science and Engineering. 

But the experience and accolades weren’t enough to get Howard into the extremely competitive graduate program of their choice. Undaunted, Howard asked Davenport for an introduction to the people they needed to meet to get the job with Rubin. 

If Howard had any advice for undergraduates, they say, it’s this: “I wouldn’t be here if I took that rejection and I just sulked,” Howard says. “I got where I’m at because I asked for a seat at the table. Most of the time, the worst thing they’re going to say is no.” 

Now, Howard and their team are focused on getting the Rubin Observatory ready for its “first light” next year, when the world’s largest digital camera takes its first images of the cosmos. They’ve already visited the observatory in Chile, and they hope they’ll get a chance to return to see the camera installation. 

Howard is also working to stay on the data team after the observatory is fully operational. For now, their job lasts through the commissioning stage, but they’re hopeful they have a good shot at staying with Rubin for the long term. 

“This was my whole goal. I went back to school saying this is the project I want to base my career on,” Howard says. “I didn’t think I would be able to do it without a doctorate. Surprise – I’m doing it.”