ABSTRACT

This talk relates the story of amateur scientists and their role in tracking the first satellites. Known as “Moonwatchers,” this largely forgotten network of citizen-scientists helped professional astronomers by providing critical and otherwise unavailable information about the first satellites. This story is memorialized in McCray’s recent book Keep Watching the Skies: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age (Princeton University Press).

McCray is a professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a research group leader at the NSF-funded Center for Nanotechnology in Society. Before moving to UCSB in 2003, McCray worked as a historian at the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, MD. McCray’s research focuses on the history of modern science and its intersection with politics and popular culture.