User:Zowie

Zowie, in real life, is Dr. Craig DeForest, a solar astrophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute.

I earned my Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1996. I've been studying plasma physics since I was a teenager: my first job, in 1984, was at the D3D tokamak in San Diego. In graduate school, I helped build and fly a sounding rocket (the MSSTA) to photograph the solar corona in EUV. From 1995-1999 I operated the Michelson Doppler Imager on board the SOHO spacecraft; since then I have been located at SwRI.

I am particularly interested in matter-field interactions in the solar corona and young solar wind, and in science outreach in general. Current research projects include MHD simulations of the lower solar atmosphere and of coronal mass ejection onset. Much of my recent work involves imaging of the solar wind via Thomson scattering of sunlight by free electrons in interplanetary space. The instruments that do this are called heliospheric imagers. These imagers are generally simple cameras, but the data analysis requires sophisticated post-processing to remove "background" light from the Zodiacal light and starfield, which can be 1,000 times brighter than the faint solar wind signal.

Scientific accomplishments of note include the discovery of magnetosonic waves propagating through the solar corona, development of the world's first fluxon simulation code for efficient modeling of low-β plasmas, making the first-ever stereoscopic magnetograms of the Sun using the Zeeman splitting of the solar Fe absorption line at 6173 Angstroms, and producing the first detailed quantitative (photometric) images of solar wind phenomena such as coronal mass ejections, more than 45° from the Sun itself in the sky.

I live, work, and play in the Boulder, Colorado area. I was once very active in the Wikipedia community -- my 1,000th edit occured on July 30, 2006, and I have started hundreds of articles -- but since then, I have cut down considerably. I still edit pages and/or contribute new material from time to time, but only as time permits.

At some point in the last few years, someone wrote a page about me (Craig DeForest).