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(Jeff) So why don't we take a step back and discuss your excitement with astronomy. Tell us your first interaction with the cosmos.

(Howard) The first… well, like on the second date. Anyway, sorry, I went to a summer camp when I was in grade 6. And one of the camp counselors who to me at the time seemed like a really senior adult, was probably just in his early 20s. He was an astronomy nutcase, and we were north of Montreal under very dark skies, and he took a bunch of the nerdiest kids in the camp out. Who wants to look at the night sky? Well, okay, maybe. The skies were beautiful. He knew a lot about the sky, and that completely wowed me.

And so, I came home from camp and said, I want to save up money to buy a telescope. I was delivering newspapers at the time, so I saved my money, and I bought a telescope, a 60 millimeter refractor, which was basically the telescope that we gave away during International Year of Astronomy. It was very personal to me, because that was basically my first telescope.

In high school and grade 7, 8, 9, I used to always be asking to go to the library so that I could pick out my astronomy references and plan my night of observing. In grades 8, 9, 10, or so it  competed with school. I was constantly observing or thinking about observing – mostly from Montreal, which was, uh, you know, very heavily light polluted. I spent a lot more time thinking about that than I did about school. 

(Jeff) Was there anything in particular you were looking at? Was it deep sky or planets or everything?

(Howard) Planets, planets. And so this is the thing, again, which we do at the observatory. So I remember, oh, you can see the rings of Saturn with this telescope. Really? And so I don't know if Saturn was on opposition around that time, but I looked at it. I mean, it was like midnight, and I'm out in the street alone, and I'm screaming like, wow! Like, it looks like a sticker, you know, like the young kids. And so that was it. Deep Sky was hard in the city, but I very quickly became interested in trying to find galaxies and things that are very far away. But Saturn was an easy thing to grab through your telescope and get excited about.

(Jeff) Now, was there a quantitative aspect to your watching?

(Howard) Sort of, I had, like, notebooks, logbooks, and one time I recorded the phases of Venus by sketching. For, I don't know, 3, 4, 5 months, and then I made a table of the phases, and I don't know, compared with what the expected phase or something. It was semi-quantitative. The Messier objects are the thing that every amateur should try to see all of them, and so… which is next impossible in a city, but I became obsessed with finding Messier objects and galaxies always impressed me, like I said, and they still do. Galaxies are my favorite target for astrophotography now, and so, uh, yeah. 

(Jeff) Were you doing this on your own, or were you part of a club, or…

(Howard) So it was almost entirely on my own. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada had a pretty active group in Montreal at the time, but I remember I went to one meeting. My parents dropped me off. And I was like, I want to become a member. Maybe my memory is false about this, but, well, how old are you? I was like, I don't know, 14. No, you have to be 16 to be a member.

(Barbara) Oh, my goodness.

(Howard) Maybe this is not true. I mean, you know how you can manufacture memories to suit your telling a story. I was like, something was off-putting about it, which was kind of surprising. And it was a group of much older people than me at the time that were very tightly knit, and it was like their club and so it was sort of hard to get into the inner circle, as it were, so then I ended up doing mostly it on my own. 

(Jeff) And were you interested in physics outside of astronomy in high school?

(Howard) Yeah, I was. I took PSSC physics, 2 years of it, which I'm not sure would have been one of the very few experiments with PSSC. We had a teacher who was really tough, but really brilliant, smart, and he knew how to excite people's imaginations in class with difficult problems and all that. And so being in his class was what pushed me into physics.

And discovering that I could do it. We had assignments, and he would… From my recollection, he would have you pick up your assignment in order of grade. Maybe I made that up, too, because that seems like a very uninspiring thing to do. But I remember one time when I finally, like, I had the top grade, and I got my assignment. I strolled back to my friends, and they were like, like, wow, how did you do that? And so that was that sort of recognition and the ability to solve problems that got me excited.

(Jeff) And so you went to McGill for your undergrad?

(Howard) All three – undergrad, MSc, Phd, which was also almost a career killer. Yeah, that was because I wanted to be in Montreal at home, you know, with our families.

(Jeff) There have been a few people at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Úwho've done all three degrees there. Not many, but a few.

(Barbara)  No, generally better to range around a bit. McGill is a strong department, but still, you need to get to know people. But you did, you managed. You found your path. 

(Howard) You need to get to know people. And the MIT postdoc helped a lot, but then I went back for my second postdoc to McGill for my supervisor again, like, I was asking for it. But it was for personal reasons, we loved living in Boston, but we both wanted to go back home, especially Loula. And then the TRIUMF thing was completely by accident, really. It worked out incredibly well. 

(Jeff) Okay, so you did your BSc at McGill. Was there anything that sort of stands out to you about your undergrad career?

(Howard) My undergrad career. Okay, so at McGill had a very tough, tough honours undergrad program in those days. It still is, but I think they overdid it when I was an undergrad. And so, for example, undergrads took quantum mechanics in our final year with Schiff as a textbook. And took E&M with Jackson as a textbook. I mean, what were they thinking?

And so it was merciless. and the experience was so hard only 2 or 3 of us ended up going on to grad school, because it just burned people out and gave you the wrong impression, I think. 

(Jeff) Was there much of an experimental component?

(Howard) There was, which turned out to actually be really good. So there was one experiment that had been on the books for years, but it had never really worked out very well. There was one aspect of the experiment that didn't make any sense that was a bottleneck. And I figured out the bottleneck, and then we ended up finding, for the very first time, that it actually worked out the way it was supposed to, and I really enjoyed it, it was like a puzzle to solve and to actually implement it, and so on. It was very tightly integrated into our curriculum. But it did not make enough of an impression for me to leave theory. 

(Jeff) That was the point of the question.

(Howard) It might have been, because it was a really, it was a good experience. 

(Jeff) We've had a few students who go through the lab who are strong on the theory and sort of sneered at an experiment, which I always thought was kind of a strange attitude for someone in physics, but it happens.

(Howard) Yes, yes. So I recall that attitude, actually. Things about undergrad that it's, oh, I didn't like this part, didn't like that part, and I was like, what was I thinking? So it looked back and say, not the experimental part so much. I really found that interesting. And fun. But anyway, at least I do, you often form impressions very quickly based on, like, little or no evidence. And then that bias persists for a long time, unless you shake it loose. Something shakes it loose.

(Jeff) So now, another thing that I'm always interested in is how you chose the specialty that you ended up in. Were you interested in that aspect of physics from day one, or was there some other factor? Did you encounter a faculty member who was in that field that shifted you over to that, or how did that interest develop?

(Howard) Yeah, two or three people that I worked with ended up being important, one at McGill, who was my PhD supervisor, one at MIT who we used to call the God of Theoretical nuclear physics. And I didn't know that much about him, actually, before I started working with him. And then finally Richard [Woloshyn] at TRIUMF. So there were some nudges initially into particle physics phenomenology from my PhD supervisor, but it was phenomenology, the strong interactions in those days. Now we have formal field theory of particle physics on the computer, which just sounds like numerics, but is much more sophisticated than that. But it allows, in principle, an exact solution, or a controllable set of approximations to the solutions, for example, like quark confinement, how quarks are bound inside of baryons and mesons.

But in those days, it was intractable. I mean, there's still no analytical solution to QCD, so it was modeling. And it was a very strong modeling group at MIT, the MIT BAG model was known throughout particle physics. And so that was another issue which brought me to MIT, because it was the home of the BAG model.

And so anyway, so that was the phenomenology. And then with the person I worked with at MIT, it was a little more theoretical bent to that kind of development of QCD. 

And then at TRIUMF, I walked into Richard's office the first day, and we talked, and he said, oh, here's a paper you might want to read. That's it. And I was like, wow, this looks like a really exciting area to go into. And I used to joke with him that, like, he was like a spider at the center of his web, and he put out a little tingling, and he put out a little thing that would rope you in, okay? And he certainly did that to me. And that's how I ended up working in Lattice QCD at a time when it was really burgeoning as an area of research.

(Barbara) But how did you know what area you were going to do your PhD in?

(Howard) I was an astronomy nut, you know, from high school. But in the 1970s, astronomy was kind of like, you know, not much was happening, really. I mean, at some level. Like, the era of precision cosmology was just a fantasy in those days. Whereas particle physics … the early 1980s was the boom time of particle physics.

(Barbara) That's when they started forming the quark picture and stuff like that.  

(Howard) The thing that convinced people that quirks were real was the discovery of the charm quark. The charm quark is massive enough that its motion within its bound state is sort of non-relativistic, which gave people a handle on calculating it.

This very clear, visible picture that this thing should be comprised of a quark and an antiquark pair, and this is exactly what the deep and elastic scattering experiments revealed. And they found a resonance called the J-Psi in 1974, and it was like the J-Psi revolution. That made a break between previous theories of particle physics that were very formal. Yeah, maybe there are quarks, maybe there aren't, but then it was just… now we know for absolute certainty. I mean, we knew before, depending on who you talked to. 

The phenomenology of hadronic bound states really opened up a whole area of research that became very exciting as a theorist.

(Howard) I was actually on my third postdoc when I applied to SFU, and I was sort of seeing the event horizon approaching because, you know, 3rd postdoc is kind of your last one. I was at TRIUMF at the time in the theory group.

(Jeff) And so how would you describe the job market? If you did 3 postdocs, it's not good.

(Howard) It was not. I mean, there were jobs, but few were in particle physics. There were postings, but not many, maybe a couple, three, four a year, and the competition, of course, was really, really tough.

But I remember when I was in high school, I used to go to these meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society in Montreal. This was in the mid 70s or late 70s, and there was a grad student there who was bemoaning his fate that there were absolutely zero jobs. And I thought, really? You know, well, maybe he isn't as good as he thinks he is. I mean, what a stupid thought. But I had no idea.   

(Jeff) You mentioned that your third postdoc was at TRIUMF. Can you tell us about the first two, and how you came to TRIUMF, and what you knew of Vancouver beforehand.

(Howard) Well, my first postdoc was an NSERC postdoc at MIT. That was a really good learning experience in many ways. There was a room full of postdocs from other countries that were funded by their governments. And so the faculty at MIT and the theory group were basically not interested unless you showed, almost aggressively, that you were worthwhile. It was kind of cutthroat. And so I escaped from that fate almost by accident, but then I kind of got into the inner circle, which turned out to be very handy.

From there I went back to McGill for another postdoc, just because Loula and I wanted to go back home. And I realized, going back to the same place that I have my degrees was not a great idea, but it was personal.

I came to Vancouver for a conference in February 1991 hosted by the TRIUMF Theory Group. And this was one of those February days where it's like springtime. I thought, how come nobody told me there's this place in Canada that's like this? And I went berserk. I mean, I spent the weekend warping all over town. I was just wowed. 

And then it so happened that a job opened up at TRIUMF and that one of the guys involved in the search was a fellow that I had met at the conference, Richard Woloshyn. I almost didn't apply as it was late, past the deadline, but Richard let me squeak through.

So there was, I mean, the way I see there are sort of series of fortuitous circumstances that could have easily gone another way. And so where I ended up, I feel like it was just like a series of very lucky breaks. That was one of them.

(Jeff) Had you been to Vancouver before that conference?

(Howard) No, I hadn't, and so I was just completely wowed. I mean, you know, those February days, right? I was downtown around Stanley Park, I was all over just by foot, you know, because I wanted to see the city on the ground, and I… I was like, wow. So that's the impression. I went back to Montreal in February in the dead of winter. 

And then I asked Loula to come out, because it was like, Oh, it'd be nice to be in Vancouver and it's a great place. It's different, and so on. So that kind of helped, too.

(Jeff) So when you were at TRIUMF, Richard Woloshyn was, I believe, an adjunct faculty member at SFU.

(Howard) Yes, he was. So there's another fortuitous circumstance. Richard was on the hiring committee for the faculty position at SFU, which I didn't know at the time. But I never asked him and he never said anything about it. But it doesn't look like a coincidence. I mean, we had ended up with a really good working relationship.

Richard can be an interesting kind of fellow. He'll invite you into his office and ask you a question and see what happens. And that first kind of, like, discussion that we had turned out to be really, really great.  

So we became friends over time, but it was just… it was a wonderful working relationship, and so that was another kind of really great circumstance.

(Jeff) So in your work at TRIUMF, did you do anything at SFU? Or was it you basically at TRIUMF all the time?

(Howard) I was at TRIUMF, and I really knew very little about 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Úuntil my interview was scheduled, and then I went up to the campus to look around and get an idea of what it was like up there, but so it was… it was a real… it was all new to me.

(Jeff) And who was chair at that time?

(Howard) I think Mike Plischke was chair during the hiring process, if I remember correctly, and then Bob Frindt became chair around the time that I started. And they both had big impacts, very positive impacts on me. 

(Jeff) And were there others in the department at that time doing similar work to you, or were you on your own?

(Howard) Ok, there was Vishwanathan who was working in particle physics, but in a very formal area, string theory. And I was working in the theory of the strong interactions and the connection to phenomenology. And so in principle, part of the appeal was to get somebody who could work with Vishwanathan, but it became clear to me when I was being interviewed that the position was a little different. I don't think the department was so much looking for a particular kind of particle physicist. I don't think it really mattered. My impression was they were looking for somebody who was able to communicate to the rest of the department.

And so, this worked to my advantage. These were impressions that formed viscerally at the time, but it seemed like a very strong thing. So I gave my talk, and there were lots of questions and all that, but it was like this flavor of particle physics or that flavor, it doesn't matter, just somebody that we can communicate with. And so that was a help.

(Jeff) So you and Vish were basically the only particle physics people, and in ‘87 just before you started, Mike Wortis joined; he was soft condensed matter. And then John Bechhoefer joined in ‘89. So there was a soft condensed matter focus in the department as well as a hard condensed matter. And then you and Vish were probably the only two outside of that.  

(Howard) There was an experimentalist, Otto Hauser, who was always at TRIUMF, and that was sort of the other thing that was clear that that was not, rightly so, that was not considered such a great thing. And so, my collaborators were at the TRIUMF Theory Group. So for the first many years, I would go on my days off at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Úto TRIUMF.

Vish and I were such different interests that it didn't really work out. And at first I thought, well, maybe I'll try to push myself in that direction, but it was, like, it was too much. My research program was going… Well, in the direction that it was in.

And in those days a theory group at TRIUMF was really great. I don't know it so well now, but it was also very collegial group with very good abilities to pick really excellent postdocs, and so it was a really nice little community within TRIUMF.

My generation that went through the theory group, quite a few of them ended up getting faculty positions, I think, more than you'd expect, you know, based on this. It’s a good sign.  They picked good people, and they helped them along. They didn't tell you, oh, you have to work in my area. You came in and they were like, you do what you want to do. And so that was also very, very good for me personally. 

(Jeff) Yeah, Otto was interesting. I have a recollection of him only teaching once while I was in the department. An interesting fellow, he played the cello, as I recall. But I never had much to do with him.

(Howard) I mean, he was very personable. I mean, I really liked him and I would see him at TRIUMF, you know, quite often. Yeah.

(Barbara) So do you have recollections from your early years as a faculty member at SFU?

(Howard) I mean, bits and pieces. I just remember feeling at home in the department, like, right away. Feeling very comfortable being there and you know, the first semester I didn't have to teach. My office was in the kinesiology side. I think we still have Igor's [Igor Herbut] office up there, and there's still some in that area. It was almost like I was hiding in my office up there, although I loved being in the department. I was up in my office, and so… and I knew that at some point, Bob had to come and tell me, you know, this is what you're going to teach.

And one day he knocks on my door. Okay, Howard, the time has come. Okay, so I don't remember how quantum mechanics came up, but that was the course. And then, like the first time in class ... I enjoyed being a TA. And I but I didn't really expect how much I would end up enjoying teaching. The first time in class, I was just like, what? Wow, this is something that I didn't expect. I enjoyed it a lot, and so it very quickly became, like, a big part of my… how I identified myself at SFU, my role.

(Jeff) So, you TA'd as a grad student, presumably, but, you hadn't done any teaching, you hadn't actually taught a course before?  

(Howard) Nope, nope. No, and I don't think that was that unusual at that time. You know, those were the circumstances. Barbara, you can comment, but this idea of developing a teaching portfolio and all that is new. My impression was teaching was important, but it was kind of like… I mean, at SFU, it was always important, and that was apparent in the interview. But in general, the idea was research first and teaching, you know, okay, sometime later.

(Jeff) One thing I'm always interested in is how important the teaching is in choosing a career as in academia versus outside. How important was the teaching component in making that decision?

(Howard) Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I was like other people, but I mean, at that time, I was just hoping to find a faculty position, but I was prepared that, you know, I might be at the end of my career.

There's a story that I'm not sure I should tell you about the other interview. I had one other interview that the contrast of which was incredibly striking. The teaching was in the back of my mind. Yes, I'm going to have to do that, but never mind. I'll get to that if I get to that. And again, I think that was probably a very common attitude. 

(Barbara) No, we weren't trained to teach. We were trained to do research.

(Howard) And not to value teaching. This department was very different from other places that I had been visited or worked at. The collegiality of the department was such a contrast to this other interview that I had. I think the 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Úinterview came first, and it was very clear, I knew who was on the list. It was quite competitive, and I thought I may not get that. But there's other place I think I gave a really good talk and the reaction for people afterwards was like, I though that I was a shoe in. But it was my impression that it was such an awful place to work that I would rather not. And it was not in Vancouver, and actually someplace else that was like, you know, anti-Vancouver. And I thought, Loula is not going to like it here, and why would I want to be in a department as dysfunctional as that one? I would have preferred no job than a job there.

(Barbara) I've had experiences like that, too. Yeah, places you really don't want to live or department you don’t want to be in.

(Howard) It was just so striking. During the interview process at SFU, people very welcoming, curious about you, and so on. And it was just a very, very, very different experience. 

(Jeff) One thing that strikes me about the department is that it has maintained that level of collegiality almost from day one. I'm assuming that Rudy Herring would, when he did the initial hires, choose for that aspect, and it's always seemed quite remarkable to me that it's been able to maintain that level of collegiality over the 60-odd years now that the department's been around.

(Howard) Big changes. But I guess we all end up wanting to preserve that right? 

I was on search committees several times, both for another particle physics position and for a condensed matter physics position. Collegiality was always something that was an issue – finding a person that is personable and that we're going to be able to relate to, and so on.

(Barbara) Yeah, that's what I figured, too, that it was due to the original set of people they hired, or how they set up the department in the first place, that that aspect became really important to all the future hirings. 

(Howard) Like I said, during my interview it was just clear from people's attitudes and the way they were talking to me and to each other, that that would be the case. It was obvious that it was a very collegial place.

(Howard) Actually, teaching thermal physics was one of my most pleasant experiences as an instructor. I started to request courses to teach that I didn't really like as an undergraduate. There weren't that many, but thermal physics definitely was one of those.

And then it was like, you know, the usual thing, oh, a stat mech, now it all makes sense. I thought, this has got to be wrong. And so how am I, how am I going to find out? Well, I'm going to throw myself into it. That's one of the opportunities of being a faculty member. You can learn things at a much deeper level than you did before, and that was especially true in  thermodynamics, thermal physics. And so that was just it was great. I went nuts over that course.

(Jeff) I always felt that grad students don't learn first year physics until they TA’s the course.

(Howard) Pretty much all of the interactions that you and I had, you kept coming up with really nice demos for me to do in class, and I'm not sure how many had been done before, but I came nice to have a demo to do this. Ask Jeff, and then we'll. 

You're telling me about the demo, like, well, maybe you don't really understand the physics, so ask Jeff. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. 

(Barbara) So when did you start teaching first year physics?

(Howard) The first thing I taught was graduate quantum mechanics, first level, which was also a kind of trial by fire. But I love that. And then I think the second course that I taught was 120.

(Jeff) Oh, okay. And 120 was at the had the modern physics component at that time? 

(Howard) It did. It had the notes that Dave had written, which I thought were great, so that was another thing we were trying. I mean, I tend to react kind of emotionally to things. I was like… This way that he had of presenting the basics of particle physics. This is fantastic. So I went kind of crazy, but it was a big booster about that aspect of the course.

(Barbara) So did you manage to do more astronomy after you started at 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Úin your early years?

(Howard) No, Leigh [Palmer] had been teaching 190 for forever.

(Barbara) Right. It's true. You started teaching 190 at one point after Leigh retired. 

(Howard) I seem to remember 2007, but actually, you know, I taught that course more than 20 times. 

I looked it up, when they asked me to come back to teach it again after retiring, and I thought, like, what? Wow. I mean, it doesn't feel like that. Every time was a thrill. I never got bored with it.

(Jeff) But the other thing is that astronomy has changed so much in the last 20, 30 years that each time you taught it, there'd be something new to teach.

(Howard) Yeah. Something new to teach, and, you know, students used to ask me about, like, how I ended up working in particle physics. I go, well, if I was a graduate student now, there's no doubt that I'd be doing cosmology. It underwent a revolution in scope, sources of data, etc. There's so much data now, the difficulty is managing it all. 

(Barbara) That's good. So you were able to continue that interest. 

(Howard) I did, but I stopped using my telescope personally when I started my undergrad work. Studies were like full time. And then I used to wonder why when I started at SFU, it's funny, I used to really be interested in using a telescope, but hmm.

But then I taught astronomy and that brought it back right away.

Concept, fundraising and location 

(Barbara) And what do you remember about getting involved in the observatory project? 

(Howard) So Dave Boal had a proposal that had languished for a time. I think fundraising was very difficult. And then, the 2009 International Year of Astronomy came along and that changed my thinking and work trajectory in a major way. During the course of that year, I mean, I can talk some more about IYA, if you like, but anyway, I ended up loving that interaction with the public so much. And I thought, geez, we ought to have an observatory and Dave has his proposal. And so one day my brother Lorne came to visit Vancouver. We drove around campus and I said, bro, what do you think about building an observatory up here? And he said, like, Yes. 

(Barbara) Here we go. 

(Howard) My brother and our family foundation support science education and climate change mitigation. So my brother is like a Renaissance man of science, interested in all kinds of science. One of his daughters is in environmental science. The one is an immunologist by training. And so he can talk to you about anything. He's asking questions as an undergrad that I couldn't answer, for example. So he knows a lot, he is very keen. He was, I mean, a major personal influence on me, we're 11 years apart, so he was almost a father figure to me growing up. 

But anyway, yeah. So that was the genesis of the observatory. 

(Jeff) Yeah, I remember the initial estimates for cost were sort of a few hundred thousand, and then it gradually got larger and larger. 

(Howard) That's right. But another thing which happened that I mean, the delays in making the project. I mean, the funding that my brother committed. I can't remember how soon I made this known to the department. 

(Barbara) We'd started a fundraising campaign before that. Because we were working on plans with Lee Gavel, in facilities. So we're talking to the architect, and we're talking about that spot that David picked out in front of the Student Union Building, and then we're talking about that addition to the Diamond Alumni Club. There was a million dollars just to do the support on the hill, on the cliff, at that site. 

(Howard) Lorne’s original proposal was that there'd be some sort of matching funding. I mean, his funding was there, which is what led to that preliminary design by the DAC, which I think was Phil McCoy in Facilities idea. So the idea was to try to raise matching money, but that was, as you said, very, very slow going. So then he said, you know, okay, fine. 

There were a number of things that took time for us to work through, and um… And I used to be, like, very impatient. Oh, no, can’t do that. And we have to go back to the drawing board, whatever it was, but it was really good that that happened, because that spot where we ended up popped up. After the Stary Nights program, which I was running with RASC on the grass, started. 

Okay, and I thought this would be what a place to be, you know, a central location. Everybody would go nuts about it. But, like, you know, this has been empty for 50 years. No one has gotten to build anything, so I'm not even gonna, like, bring it up. 

But then one day, the person who's in charge of campus planning, Lee Gavel, who I called Mr. No because he had to say no to all kinds of projects. And he came to us and said, have you ever thought about that grassy area next to the AQ? What? So that was also luck that we waited. We ended up waiting that long for the program to become known enough to have that level of support to get that location. And if it had been at the Diamond Alumni Center, there were advantages. The sky was darker, but it's the middle of nowhere. 

(Barbara) No, it's a very nice spot. He described it as a garden ornament. So it didn't have to fit in with the architectural plan of the university, because it was a garden ornament. And then we put the classroom over in the new chemistry building that was being built at that time. 

Design 

(Howard) Right, right. I mean, there was one issue about the design in that location, because, you know, the campus is rectilinear. How do you integrate a hemisphere into that geometry that doesn't match? And they're like, okay, well, there are roll off roof observatory. Yeah, I have a roll-off roof observatory. That is not an observatory for the public. They have to recognize what it is. 

So then Phil McCoy in facilities laid the groundwork for the design, which was, you know, like the plaza, the idea of the plaza only came up when we got that location. And so then it became much more than an observatory, because when are you going to use the observatory? The plaza was an opportunity to tell the story of science, day and night. 

So the plaza is rectilinear, and like the structures, the hedges, and so on, they draw your eyes east-west, and they alleviate the conflict between the dome and at least that was the theory as I understood it. And so it complements rather than rather clashes. 

Phil had a huge impact on the project. It was his initial design that was taken over by a professional landscape architectural company that had completed the design, but it was his vision initially for that.  

We had a formal committee of students that I'd gotten to know, and faculty. Daniel Leznoff was on it, for example. Anyway, we bandied ideas about for what to do with the space. How do we make best use of this space to tell the story of science, which turned out to be really exciting. It was a tremendously fun process, and many different people contributed ideas. Including Danny. Danny goes, you know what? We should have spectra displayed somehow. 

(Jeff) Well, there's the planetary walk. 

(Barbara) and the sundial. 

(Howard) Yes, Len Bergren did that. He got a group of students at BCIT to build the sundial, which I thought was fabulous, because you come into one of the entrances to the site, and there's a sundial built by students from a neighboring academic institution. I thought that that was just like Kizmet to have that. I mean, nobody really realizes that now, but I certainly do every time I go by there. 

And the powers of 10, which were integral to the structure of the site, was the idea of a student who'd been in my astronomy class, Ciara Morgan-Feir, who's now an MD. So it was her idea, very outgoing, very dynamic person, and she took over the presidency of the Astronomy Club and built it into this huge thing. And she's like, powers of 10. I'm like Obviously. And that became a major structure, right, that runs through the whole site. 

Two of my ideas were the starry walls and the cosmic calendar. After Ciara says, we should have powers of 10. I go, yeah, length scale, cool, done. Time scale. We have to have Carl Sagan's cosmic calendar. And so ideas kind of arose from these group discussions that were really fun. 

Construction 

(Jeff) Tell us a bit about the actual physical construction of the observatory. Were you deeply involved? Were you on doing site inspections every day? 

(Howard) So I was involved, but really peripherally, because I was out of my zone of expertise. I mean, I was consulting with the architects and we ended up with a really excellent landscape architectural company that completed, but added to, Phil's initial conception. And we interviewed, I think, 3 different companies. And the person who came in, he had a young daughter who was in elementary school, and he found out about the Starry Nights program, and he was like, this is the kind of thing that my daughter needs to have. He was just, like, personally invested in this idea. We're like, and so, yeah, so we collaborated. 

For example, the starry walls. I said to him, we're gonna have these starry walls. He goes, oh, how about illuminated starry walls? I'm like, of course, you know, like, uh, so that interaction with him continued during the development. 

(Barbara) The project was written up in a magazine or something, wasn't it?  

(Howard) Yeah, it won the 2017 Canadian Society of Landscape Architects National Award of Excellence. I still have the cover copy somewhere. 

(Barbara) Do you still have the slideshow of the construction? It'd be worth putting it up on the website so that it's there. 

(Howard) Yeah. I have a high-definition copy. That video came from an idea from somebody in not facilities, but in communications perhaps IMC. That was again a wonderful thing that we did, right? So to see the whole evolution over time was really great. (See link to the slide show in Additional Materials below.) And I used to go there and stand at the gate where I knew the camera was shooting, you know, just to see if I could maybe show up. And I went through it - There I am. 

And so the construction, yeah, it was kind of a blur. 

(Barbara)  Well, that's not all that you were doing at the time, right? 

(Howard) Well, I mean, you know, it… I mean, I ended up really turning off my research program around that time. I went back to look at my publication records. I was kind of shocked. My last paper was 2012 or 2014. I really moved into this, and I then saw the end of my career coming up. That was around the time that I went through this. 

(Barbara) Well, the International Year of Astronomy. That was a huge time thing. 

(Howard) That was huge, and that was also completely accidental, because my brother and our foundation had received a small request for support from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada for their public outreach, and he goes, they're having a meeting in Victoria, maybe you want to go? I said, oh yeah, sure, I'll go out. And so at this meeting, it was almost like a religious revival. People, oh, here in, you know, in St. John's, we're gonna do this, and I add,  count 51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Úin Vancouver in. I'm not kidding. So if I hadn't gone to that meeting, there would have been no IYA. 

(Barbara) Right! 

(Howard) And my career would have been what it was before. It was just another really fortuitous event. I went there. Oh, you’re sure bro, you really want to go? Okay, fine. I'll go, and… Uh, yeah, and then it was just, like they said, you know, wow. 

(Barbara) I like that description. Like a religious revival. You got the message. 

(Howard) Yeah, yeah, loud, loud and clear. I mean, the Vancouver Royal Astronomical Society, one of their reps was there, and they were absolutely planning to do stuff. And then we partnered with them, and that’s when I became involved first as a member of the club and then as president of it for a year or two, and that connection turned out to also be very fortuitous, because they were at the Planetarium. And they had their monthly meetings in an auditorium in the planetarium, and they were able to use the observatory there for some public outreach nights. But the Planetarium’s budget was always hand to mouth. I mean, it almost closed a number of times. They couldn't afford the insurance. Or are they trying to save money by not providing insurance for people from outside the institution to use the observatory and the site. And so they were kind of like looking for a home, and I was like, you got one at SFU. And they'd already been going to our starry nights and so on. And then that just so then we made a formal arrangement with the University that they would be guaranteed access to the observatory. 

And so the day that the telescope is installed, they brought in a huge crane. The telescope manufacturer sent out an engineering team member, a really young guy, but brilliant, brilliant fellow. 

And they were going to start lowering the telescope at, I don't know, it was like 10 a.m. On a Tuesday. And I'm always like, oh, I want to sleep in. But I'm running into campus, say, well, maybe I can get there, and it was already sort of coming down through the slit. But I got there early enough to take a video, just in time, of the thing being lowered into the observatory. So that was really a signature moment. (See link to the video in the Additional Materials, below.)  

The telescope  

(Jeff) Give us some of the specs on the telescope and how you chose it. 

(Howard) Shortly after the IYA, I had completely rekindled my interest in astronomy, and I'd also become aware of astrophotography. I got myself a really high quality, small astrograph refractor with a precision mount and so on, and a nice camera, and I started shooting pictures from our home at 15th and Dunbar. Very light polluted, but … I still have my first picture of the Orion Nebula. For me, it was like, wow, you can see color in this picture. I had no idea. And so I fell like a stone into astrophotography. And then I built a roll-off roof observatory at our country place in the Okanagan. It’s a roll-off roof observatory, but it has all the issues that a real observatory on a pier, and so on. And that was kind of a useful learning experience. 

It was completed well before we built the observatory at SFU. But it came in handy. So after doing a lot of research, the telescope that I ended up, the company that produced that, they were they were like a revolution in telescope design. Bigger apertures than you had ever seen before. Because of the novel optical design they had, the design is a classical Dal Kirkham that had aberrations, which they figured out how to correct and modify. And so their telescope was half the cost for a comparable aperture built by other people that were using like the Hubble Space Telescope design. Okay, it was still expensive, but we could just barely afford it. And that telescope is fabulous. And that's manufacturer that provided the telescope that we ended up with. We looked around, and you know the RASC helped. Just, you know, do due diligence to be sure that this was the right thing to do. Because, you know, it was going to be mostly visual observing, and it was perfectly fine for visual observing, but it allowed you to do astrophotography as well.  

(Barbara) And what was the company’s name?  

(Howard) Planewave Instruments. They used to be in California, but they're now in Michigan, and their business is booming more than ever. Larger apertures. So they came out with a meter telescope. 

I mean, so the telescope, we got 70 centimeters. That was… you're kidding. And then, like, the meter telescope is, you know, it goes up with the square of the aperture or something, and so it, uh, it's a lot more expensive, but, like, wow. And so I eventually stopped using my observatory in the Okanagan. And so I now have a telescope at a remote location in California, which is also from Plane Wave which is not the 27 inch we have at SFU, but a 24 inch telescope. You can’t afford that unless you have a rich brother. But anyway, I do. 

So this is now, I mean, astrophotography is one of the big things that I'm doing now is in retirement. Keeps me busy. 

(Jeff) And just on that score, how many APODs (astronomical photo of the day) have you had? 

(Howard) A measly 4. Okay, so you know, there's a whole community. 

(Jeff) And who's responsible for the APOD competition Howard? 

(Howard) Okay, so there's two professional astronomers that launched it in 1995, and they still … I don't know how they do it. They still manage it. Apparently, they still look at almost every picture which is submitted. I think they get all the pictures that are submitted are dumped into another site that they have called Starship Asterix. 

And you look through that 100 a day, maybe, you know, half of which are, my goodness, that's an amazing picture. 

And so it's… you have to do good work, or not necessarily like deep, expensive astrophotography, but just like a novel idea, camera-mounted tripod that did this, that nobody had ever done before, or something. 

And so they're very clever things, but if you want to do like what I'm doing, then it's almost like a lottery. It has to be very good, and you have to submit and submit. And so the stuff that I was doing at the Okanagan, I thought was good enough to get into APOD, maybe, but for 10 years I was wondering, when am I ever going to get an APOD? As you talk to any of the students who are first involved in like running the observatory. When I first got my APOD, they go, oh yeah, you to complain all the time about not having an APOD. You finally got one. 

And so, you know, 4 is not bad. But the sort of guru of astro image processing. People think big telescope, great picture like, no, you have to know how to operate the telescope. You have to know how to choose your target and so on. But then it's really more of an art than a science when you process the image. And that is hard. If you really want to produce the best image you can, it takes lots and lots of practice and experience, and so there are people in the field who are there first, when CCD cameras came on the scene and they sort of showed the way for everybody else. And so the leading guy, instructor, has more than a hundred. More than a hundred… which is… okay, that's the other extreme. So this guy is like, he's like the superstar of astronomical imaging. 

But you know, 4 is not bad. I'm not complaining. 

(Jeff) Four sounds pretty impressive to me. 

(Howard) I still submit whenever I get a new picture. So, you know, it's like I said, it's a lottery but eventually, you know. 

• – description of the observatory project 

• Transcript 20260313_Trottier