Ardis Herrold

How many people do you know who’ve built a personal telescope or observatory? Well, now you know of at least one, and she’s built both! Ardis Herrold, an education specialist with Rubin Observatory, has built both a radio telescope with former students and her own observatory—accomplishments not even many astronomers can claim. But we’ll get to those later.

Growing up, Ardis always wanted to be an astronomer. “I had it all planned until I hit college…but there’s a romantic aspect to astronomy that gets stripped away when you’re just dealing with collecting numbers.” Astronomy research wasn’t as fun as she thought it would be, so Ardis switched to her second-favorite science of geology and planned to become a planetary geologist. She didn’t find a position in that field when she graduated, but she found a job teaching science right away. While being a teacher was never Ardis’s long-term plan, it’s what she’s done for almost 40 years!

While teaching near Detroit, Michigan in the 1980s, Ardis started an after-school club called RATs (a.k.a. Radio Astronomy Team—and “star” spelled backwards). Inspired by a workshop she attended at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, she realized that radio astronomy (which can happen during the day) could solve a few challenges she faced: first, that students only go to school during the day, and second, that Detroit has a lot of light pollution. She and her students took on the huge task of building a radio telescope that actually worked—and remember, this was pre-internet! “We wrote a lot of letters and made a lot of phone calls, and made many trips down to West Virginia from Michigan,” she said. “People told us we couldn't do it and that made us determined.” Two-and-a-half years later, the RATs team completed their working radio telescope, which they named Jacob. “The students really bonded in a way I had never experienced,” Ardis said. “We still are a very large extended family over all these years.”

Ardis loved teaching, but she was frustrated with how difficult it was to get real astronomy data to use in her lessons. Plus, she always wanted to work at an observatory with professional astronomers. So her job at Rubin is the perfect role because she’s developing the exact tools she thought were missing from intro astronomy courses, while also working at an observatory. At Rubin, Ardis has created interactive classroom experiences called “investigations” that are free, online, and ready for teachers to use—all they need is a web browser and internet connection. Best of all, these experiences use real Rubin data to teach astronomy, because the best way to learn science is to do science!

Ardis has a busy job developing astronomy investigations and their related support materials for teachers. But she still makes time for lots of personal hobbies in Tucson, Arizona, where she lives now. Ardis regularly takes road trips all over the American Southwest to collect interesting rocks and minerals. She also spends time at the off-grid observatory she and her husband built in the desert near their home, using her telescopes to take photos of galaxies, nebulae, or comets. The observatory’s garage also holds her drum set—Ardis jokes that most of her visitors have no idea she plays the drums, assuming they’re her husband’s!

Ardis’s path reminds us that you can build a fulfilling career even if it doesn’t follow your exact plan. Her lifelong dream of becoming an astronomer has become a reality—after all, she works for an observatory and operates her own. You can’t get much more “astronomer'' than that! Ardis offers these words of wisdom: “Find a way to make your dream work and don't let it slip through your fingers. If the doors of the house are locked, break a window and crawl in.”

Lightning round Q&A: Get to know Ardis better!

Would you go to space?
I would—I was one of the teachers who applied to ride on the space shuttle.

If you could live in any fictional universe, which would it be?
I think I’d like to stay right here.

If you didn't have to sleep, what would you do with the extra time?
I’d want to clean and organize everything around me because I never have time for that, and I’ve taken thousands of raw astronomy images that I’ve never had time to process.

If you could have lunch with anyone, who would it be?
Vera Rubin—I’m working at an observatory that bears her name and I’d like to understand how I can best embody what her legacy should be!