The desire to discover
One of a growing number of ‘citizen scientists’ avidly watches the night skies (and earthbound critters)
Thomas Ashcraft watches the skies. Always, it seems.
He’s looking for meteors, fireballs, space dust, lightning strikes, sprites and, perhaps most important, the Green Ghost.
No, he’s not a ghost hunter or seeker of the supernatural. The Green Ghost is a green glow emanating from a jellyfish sprite — an electrical activity accompanying a lightning strike, though it can occur hundreds of miles up.
These transient events fascinate Ashcraft, who is best described as an artist turned citizen scientist, a man driven to ask questions about the universe in the hope he can also find answers.
The biggest question he asks while he paces, thinks, scribbles notes and observes the sky is, “What next?”
He’s not sure he has the answer to that one, but he knows he’s going to keep looking for it.
He’s part of a growing group of citizen scientists — some of whom have no formal training in the sciences — who gather data related to the environment, atmosphere, solar system or nearby riverbed. “They’re growing bigger, more ambitious and networking,” a 2018 Nature article said of these everyday people.
They often contribute data on issues such as climate change, tree health and radiation levels to governmental and scientific agencies.
In Ashcraft’s case, he said he can sometimes capture a solar flare or super-sized fireball seen by thousands of people in the
U.S. and download the imagery online faster than any agency can by at least two minutes.
“I can get 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 hits,” he said. “That’s a lot of attention. I’m producing a cultural product.”
Paul Smith, an Oklahoma-based citizen scientist who often communicates with Ashcraft, said their work has a “random factor, especially when it comes to monitoring the weather, that makes it hard for government agencies to be able to position themselves and be ready for these events to happen. For citizen scientists like me and Thomas, it’s right there on our doorstep.”
Smith and Ashcraft said the sprites, as scientists call them, were only discovered some 30 years ago. Ashcraft said he studies whether they play a role in weather patterns, climate change or other environmental activity.
Ashcraft, an Illinois native who has lived in the Santa Fe area since the late 1980s, is the kind of guy who needs three different dream spaces to prod, poke and push his mind.
He built an observatory in the backyard of his home south of Eldorado. On the north end of the observatory’s roof is a near infrared, low-light hypersensitive experimental Sentinel camera that gives him a view of the skies. “It was designed for nuclear test surveillance from a satellite,” he said as he wandered around his property on a recent morning.
Nearby, on the ground, is a C14 optical telescope trained on Jupiter — Ashcraft’s favorite planet. He said it’s one of the least-explored planets and he thinks “there’s something there to be discovered.” He’s curious if, just maybe, “Jupiter is a possible source of extraterrestrial intelligence.”
A separate near-infrared lowlight video camera, running all night, captures an array of wildlife passing through his 3-acre property, including deer, coyote, badgers and rats. To slow them down long enough to get a good look at them, Ashcraft places a stuffed jackalope in the middle of the trail.
It works, as video taken from the camera shows. One by one, the critters stop to sniff the fake bunny with antlers. A rat scurries out of his hole to knock it over. A buck stops to interact with it, almost seeming to expect a conversation. A coyote grabs it in its mouth and runs off — only to drop if offscreen after realizing it’s not edible.
All of this amuses Ashcraft as he watches it play out on a computer screen inside the observatory. There, you will also find an array of other screens, as well as shortwave radios, spectrographs and other mechanisms designed to capture the sights and sounds of the sky.
Those senses heighten his own delight at exploration. A recording he took of the Geminid meteor shower sounds like an intergalactic orchestra playing an introduction to the Star Wars theme. Audio he captured of space dust hitting the ionosphere sounds like the resonance of a tuning fork at play.
“It’s musical,” he said. “I’m not stressing that it is like an art form — but it could be.”
He’s also fixated on the sun, which, in its own way, drew him to Santa Fe in an old truck so many decades ago.
“I followed my ethmoid [out here],” he said, referring to the bone behind the nose. “I like the word. It’s kind of humorous to me.”
His second workspace is a large studio off Rufina Circle, not far from Meow Wolf. With the exception of a computer, it looks like something out of the 1950s, with all-wooden tables and desks displaying an array of exhibitions, note cards and experiments and plenty of room for Ashcraft to pace. A string of typewriters, relics from a bygone era, stand by ready for his use. He prefers them to computers just because he does.
One small display case is dedicated to a possible experiment to create a new kind of chewing gum. Ashcraft grew up on Bazooka Joe bubble gum and enjoyed the small comics that came with them.
He has a third space, which he dubs Heliotown II, on the campus of the Santa Fe Institute, where he is citizen artist and scientist in residence. It’s a small adobe building, where he has built a series of tiny dioramas exploring space and time.
David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, said staff and students often visit Heliotown II “to get an electric jolt of the imagination. … When we want to think in a different way, entering Tom’s scientific world becomes our inspiration.
“It’s kind of an imagination lab, because science is all about imagining the world as it is not, right?”
Ashcraft’s first job, as a 10-year-old, was delivering newspapers on his bicycle. He recalls with a smile hearing the delivery truck pull up outside his house to drop off the bundles. Sticking flyers and advertisements in them in the dark delighted him. “It was great,” he said.
Next thing you know, he was a farmer in the Ozarks, a metalworker, a visual artist. And then he was in Santa Fe.
He turned 70 in March. He said he lives a simple life and can do what he wants with his time. If anything, he said, he chases too many projects, too many night sky activities.
“I don’t know if there are any goals,” he said. “Beyond the goal of discovery. But if I can inspire creativity, that’s what it’s all about. That’s where the revolution is.”