Rekindling the Spark
/How the night sky reignited one scientist’s passion
Jesse Rivera photographs objects in space (Photo courtesy Jesse Rivera)
Season 6 | Episode 1
We’re told to follow our dreams. But often, that’s disappointing. Reality typically doesn’t measure up to what we’d imagined.
So what then? How do you reignite your passions?
On this episode, we travel from an observatory in Puerto Rico to a hillside in New Jersey, and explore how one scientist overcame the disillusionment of academia.
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Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.
VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.
WILLOW BELDEN: This season of Out There is sponsored by PeakVisor.
PeakVisor is an app that helps you make the most of your adventures.
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Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
This is a new season of Out There. And the theme we’re exploring this season is silence. Each episode, we’ll share a story about finding stillness amidst the noise — whether that’s literal or figurative.
Today’s story is about reconciling our dreams with reality. Chasing a dream can be wonderful. It’s exciting to do something you love. But all too often, we end up getting disillusioned. Because a lot of times, reality doesn’t measure up to what we imagined.
So, what then? What do you do? How do you cope when following your dreams pulls you away from what you love about them?
Samia Bouzid has the story.
SAMIA BOUZID: When Jesse Rivera started doing astronomy, he had no idea he would fall in love with it. At first, he mainly saw it as his ticket to college. It all started his senior year of high school.
JESSE RIVERA: Spring semester comes along, and this professor from the local university gives a talk about pulsar astronomy and says, “We have these opportunities available for students to come do research for the four years that they're here, and get a bachelor's degree in physics.” And I was told, “You get PAID to do this.”
SAMIA: The professor was from the University of Texas at Brownsville, right in Jesse's hometown. The school was offering a full scholarship and a four-year research stipend to five students. And that sounded pretty good to Jesse. Not because he knew the first thing about astronomy, but because he liked science and he knew he wanted to go to college. He just didn't have a way to pay for it.
So, he applied. And he got in.
The way it worked, he and his classmates split their time between doing regular college classwork and conducting astronomy research. For the most part, they used the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
For decades, Arecibo had been used to discover asteroids that might collide with Earth, or to pick up signals from exploding stars thousands of light-years away. And now, Jesse had a chance to use it himself.
In December of 2008, Jesse's first year in college, his team flew out to Arecibo for the first time. And for Jesse, nothing was quite the same after that.
The Arecibo Observatory was as big as a sports stadium. Picture a giant metal crater built into a mountainside, with something that looks like a golf ball dangling above it. The golf ball is the part of the telescope that you can move around to focus on different objects in the sky.
JESSE: It felt kind of out-of-body experience to really see the scale of this telescope. I knew it was 300 meters in diameter, but you don't realize how big 300 meters actually is until you see this massive construction that is the size of the mountain that it's built into and it's just … to think that this engineering marvel exists to look at these distant objects that are so far away, incomprehensibly far away ... it makes you feel as part of something bigger.
SAMIA: Jesse and his peers were using Arecibo to look for pulsars, these dead stars that spew radio waves. They were hoping this research would help them confirm a prediction Einstein had made almost 100 years earlier about the existence of wrinkles in spacetime.
The day after he arrived, Jesse got to operate the telescope. He sat there in the command room overlooking the dish…
JESSE: You point the telescope, and you say, “Move to this target,” and then it moves to a target. You see this giant building move, and you hear it. You hear the metal on the rails moving, you hear this mechanical noise in the background of a rainforest. And then you're able to kind of see these signals coming from space in real time.
SAMIA: Jesse couldn't get over the fact that he was just sitting in the middle of a rainforest clicking buttons and basically talking with the universe. Or, at least listening to it.
JESSE: Six months prior, I was in high school having zero idea of what astronomy actually entailed, and then all of a sudden, I was at the world's largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, and I was using it.
SAMIA: On that trip, Jesse realized he didn’t just want a full ride to college. He wanted to be an astronomer.
JESSE: I realized I loved using telescopes. It's one of those things where you just feel like you belong with the universe. It's like, I feel, it almost feels like a religious experience in a sense. It connects me, I feel, in a way that I haven't really been able to do anywhere else.
SAMIA: So, in his senior year of college, Jesse applied to an astronomy grad program at Rutgers, in New Jersey – and he got in. He was super excited, but he was also a little nervous, ’cause leaving home to chase some dream of studying the stars was not the kind of thing that's usually done in Brownsville.
JESSE: I was terrified of telling my mom, because the expectations at home, particularly in a Hispanic household and Hispanic culture, you stick around to try to help out the family in any way you can. And all my siblings had done exactly that. And when I told her, she was like, “¿Y por qué te vas?” She kept asking me why I couldn't do it from home.
SAMIA: Jesse knew it was what he wanted, though. He had a chance to do something that felt meaningful to him. And it was a chance to do something no one in his family had ever had gotten to do – get a PhD. So he was excited. And three days after graduation, he was on a plane to New Jersey.
This is where I met Jesse. Full disclosure: Jesse's my partner, and we met that summer doing astrophysics research at Rutgers. And I remember that, at the time, he was psyched to be starting his PhD, but he was also going through a bit of culture shock.
JESSE: I came from my local university in Brownsville, where all the students looked like me. Everyone in the city looked like me. It was the place where I grew up. There was a very large familiarity there.
I was now in a place where the culture was different. The people were different. The moment I moved over here, I felt like everyone was much colder to me. Everything was just, it was a culture shock for me for sure.
SAMIA: On top of that, it was dawning on him that he didn't completely fit in among other academics.
JESSE: Like my first research group meeting, I heard all these people talking, and I felt different. I realized I had a very thick Brownsville Mexican accent, and it was something that I just never thought about. I never actively thought about it. I think I managed through it by kind of changing the way I spoke, but it was the first time that I had ever actively tried to do this. And it was hard.
SAMIA: School itself was hard too. When he’d pictured himself studying astronomy, he imagined using telescopes like he had at Arecibo. But in reality, he rarely got to do that. His first couple years were full of classes. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electricity and magnetism. And when he finally got back to research in his third year, he spent almost all his time analyzing other people’s data and debugging code. He hardly ever even looked at the sky.
JESSE: When you're in front of a computer all day, you start asking yourself, ‘Is this what makes me an astronomer?’
SAMIA: The longer Jesse plugged away at research, the more disillusioned he became. By the fifth year of his program, he was starting to feel restless. The spark that had drawn him to astronomy in the first place was all but gone. And he began to wonder if he’d gone down the wrong path. He’d known grad school would be tough, but he just started to worry that his whole career would be screens and number-crunching and feeling out of place.
It had been years since he'd felt anything like the magic he'd felt at Arecibo.
I remember he started looking into careers in science policy or teaching. It seemed like every month he had a different idea about whether he was going to stay the course or try something different. His heart just wasn’t in astronomy anymore.
And then one day, completely unexpectedly, a glimmer of that old spark came back.
It was Jesse’s fifth year of grad school, and one of his friends had introduced him to an astrophotographer, who told Jesse about something called the New Jersey Astronomical Association. It was a site about an hour away where amateur astronomers gathered to stargaze and take pictures of objects in space.
Jesse was into photography – he'd never tried astrophotography before, but he was curious.
So, he and his friend Sheehan, a fellow grad student, decided to drive out there one night in November and see what they found.
JESSE: We start driving through all these little towns in New Jersey, very narrow roads that don't have any real street lamps. And it's just your headlights that are illuminating the road. And this goes on for miles. You see really nothing, maybe some reflectors on some mailboxes, but nothing really.
SAMIA: They drove to a clearing part way up a small mountain. There, they found a group of astrophotographers gathered in a field, next to a small observatory. The field was dotted with red light from their headlamps. And in the darkness, Jesse and Sheehan could make out the silhouettes of big telescopes aimed at the sky.
Looking at all the fancy rigs around them, Jesse and Sheehan felt a little sheepish pulling their everyday cameras out of their bags.
JESSE: We're just like these total noobs coming into this. And we just see all these different people with these telescopes, their mounts, their big tripods. We didn’t know what any of these things were.
SAMIA: They felt even more sheepish when they realized how little they knew about the sky right over their heads. I mean, they were doing PhDs in astronomy. But the photographers started talking their heads off about the objects they were imaging and what all was in the sky in November, and Jesse and Sheehan didn’t know what to say.
JESSE: Me and Sheehan were like, “We don't know any of this. Like we spend most of our time looking at our computers. We don't spend that much time looking at the night sky.”
SAMIA: The photographers welcomed them in, though. And someone even invited them to come up to the observatory, where a telescope was tracking the Orion nebula, a bright cloud of dust and gas in the Orion constellation. There was a spot on the telescope where they could attach a camera. The camera couldn’t look through the telescope, but it could fix on the same spot in the sky and see what the telescope was seeing.
So they stuck Sheehan’s camera on it and took a 30-second exposure.
And the image that came out astonished them. Up in the sky, the Orion Nebula just looked like a few specks of light. But in Sheehan’s tiny camera screen, they saw bright reds and purples and billowing clouds – the kind of thing they’d only ever seen in photos from the Hubble Space Telescope. And they realized that, with their cameras, they had a direct connection with these objects way out in space.
JESSE: It sparked something in me that I hadn't felt in such a long time, which is very, a very weird thing to say, because at this point in my life, I was looking at data from like these professional-grade telescopes. But there is something that you cannot replicate when you are the one that takes that image. And that's your conversation with the universe. And I realized, like, this is what I love about space.
SAMIA: After that night, Jesse and Sheehan started going back to the field by themselves.
They saved up their grad school money to buy a budget tracker that they could connect their cameras to, so they could latch onto one spot in the sky for hours, slowly collecting enough light for dim features to emerge.
And as they did, they got to know the sky over their heads, in a much more personal way than they had through their research.
JESSE: In order to know what I'm going to image, I have to actually look up what's up. I have to know how fast things move up in the sky. I also realized how massive things were in the sky. There's things multiple times bigger than the moon that are looming overhead at any given time. And it's just, it made me appreciate everything much more. I realized it's just like it was working on my relationship with space.
WILLOW: Hey, it’s Willow. We’ll hear the rest of the story in a moment. But first, if you’re enjoying this podcast, we have another show we’d like to recommend.
The Wild with Chris Morgan is a podcast about the wonder and resilience of nature. It’s hosted by ecologist and bear biologist Chris Morgan. Each episode takes listeners on a journey from the pacific northwest to complex ecosystems around the globe.
And it’s more than just science. The Wild is about hope and why people work so hard to protect wild spaces.
You can listen to The Wild wherever you get your podcasts.
And now, back to the story.
SAMIA: Jesse and Sheehan spent many nights out on that hillside together, telling spooky stories under the stars, jumping whenever a rustle in the woods broke the silence. And they got completely hooked on astrophotography.
Back at school, Jesse still felt drained by his work, and sometimes felt out of place in academia. But the nights that he spent doing astrophotography with Sheehan helped fill up his cup. They gave him what he needed to keep going. And, in the end, that was enough to help him stay the course.
Two years later, he finished his PhD and got a job at Swarthmore College, teaching physics and astronomy. And in some ways, Jesse’s fears about academia were true. For him, being a professional astronomer doesn’t involve a lot of telescopes. And at times, he does still feel out of place. But he’s got a tool he can fall back on now to keep that spark alive.
On a freezing November night, Jesse and I drive out to the New Jersey Astronomical Association. Sheehan’s there waiting for us when we pull up.
SHEEHAN AHMED: Hey Samia, how’s it going?
SAMIA: Hi. [laughs]
The light from his headlamp swings right into my eyes.
SHEEHAN: Sorry, I don't want to blind you.
SAMIA: Jesse and Sheehan unpack their equipment and spend almost an hour setting up. They each use a telescope along with their camera now, so setting up is a whole ordeal. They’re both trying to fix their telescopes on a star cluster called the Pleiades.
SHEEHAN: Yeah, pretty sure that's Polaris.
JESSE: That one?
SHEEHAN: Yeah.
JESSE: And then –
SHEEHAN: And then vertically up.
JESSE: Yeah. That’s exactly what I was thinking, that was Polaris too.
SHEEHAN: Um, so that's east, so that's gonna rise more.
JESSE: Okay.
SAMIA: I sit next to them in the dark.
It’s almost completely silent in a way that everyday life never is.
There’s something about being under a dark sky in a quiet place that feels almost in between real and imaginary. Like, when you look at a dark sky, you see flashes of shooting stars. You see faint pinpricks of light that appear in the corners of your eyes but disappear when you look at them head-on. It's a little disorienting in a sort of magical way.
JESSE: Alright, one, one test minute image and then I think I’m ready to start imaging.
SAMIA: Eventually, Jesse and Sheehan get things up and running.
As usual, they’re planning to spend at least an hour capturing their images, because objects like the Pleiades are so dim, it just takes that long to collect enough light for a good picture.
By this point, our fingers and toes are completely numb, so we all climb into Jesse’s car to have some dinner and warm up.
When we get out half an hour later, clouds have rolled in. Jesse and Sheehan’s telescopes have both stopped tracking and lost their targets. Jesse’s telescope is so lost, it’s now pointing at the ground.
JESSE: Look, who knows how long it's been here for.
[laughter]
SHEEHAN: [laughs] It's looking at the ground, look at it!
[laughter]
JESSE: God damn it.
SAMIA: Later, Jesse and Sheehan admitted that this actually isn’t a very unusual outcome. Often they come out and don’t get a single photograph. But they keep coming out anyway.
They’ve realized that part of the magic is in the photos they’re taking, but part of it is just being there. Sitting on a quiet hillside, peering into the universe.
JESSE: The universe just has a way of just like giving you a different perspective.
SHEEHAN: Like you’re, you're like, ‘Oh god I'm on this fragile ball in the middle of nowhere and somehow it's all working,’ and it's a good feeling. It's scary and good.
SAMIA: Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean it sounds like what you're describing is what I feel if I'm standing in front of the ocean or something.
SHEEHAN: Yeah! Ocean at night has that same feeling as staring out into space and thinking about how big things are – just utterly terrifying but in a good way like, ‘Oh there are so many things so much bigger than me and suddenly all those other things are not that important anymore.’
SAMIA: For Jesse, going out to photograph space feels a bit like church used to feel, when his parents took him there as a kid.
JESSE: It was just like you're trying to build this relationship with something that is bigger than you. And there was something soothing about that. I've had my conversation with a higher being. And now I look at the sky and I feel like I'm having that conversation every night. And building that relationship with the universe.
SAMIA: These days, when he’s not driving out to New Jersey, Jesse usually just sets up his camera on the roof of Swarthmore’s science building during his evening classes.
And he’s gotten some of his students into astrophotography too. He wants to make sure to keep the spark alive in them. Because he understands what they’ve come for. Like him, most of them come to astronomy wanting to have a connection with space, with the stars they see overhead.
JESSE: Most students who take Astronomy 1 want to actually look at the sky. But my class is at 10:30 in the morning and we just kind of do more math equations, study a bit more physics, and while there's inherent beauty in that as well, you're still looking at a computer screen.
SAMIA: So he makes sure they have a chance to really connect with space if they want to. Once or twice a year, he goes out to central Pennsylvania with some of his students to take pictures under one of the darkest skies in the northeast.
JESSE: When we first got there and they first saw the night sky, I saw in their faces the exact wonder that I felt when I first saw the sky, a truly dark sky, and you see countless stars, you see the band of the Milky Way, and especially when you're doing it with other people, it is such a spiritual connection. There's, there’s something going on there that you can't replicate anywhere else.
SAMIA: Today, Jesse's not visiting big telescopes anymore. As for Arecibo, it ended operations forever in 2020 when two cables snapped and the structure hanging over it collapsed into the dish. Now, all the research Jesse’s doing is remote, with telescopes he's never even seen. But as far as he is from the telescopes, and from the vision of astronomy that drew him to it in the first place, he still feels close to space.
And for anyone who finds themselves feeling distant from the thing they once loved, he has this to say…
JESSE: Find what gives you that spark back, find what makes you passionate about what you're doing in the first place and try to do it. Keep it in your life.
WILLOW BELDEN: That story was reported, produced, and sound designed by Samia Bouzid. Samia is an audio producer living in Philadelphia. You can see more of her work at samiabouzid.com.
The story was edited by me, Willow Belden.
And special thanks to Alessondra Springmann for letting us use some of her audio recordings from Arecibo.
If you enjoyed this story, please share the link with a friend! We’re always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising.
Coming up next time on Out There: when Paul Barach went on his first thru-hike, it changed his life.
PAUL BARACH: Less than a mile in, I rounded this bend and looked up from my map, and I froze in place. And this joy filled my chest until I thought it would burst.
WILLOW: Hiking was deeply therapeutic for Paul. It shook him out of his depression. Made him feel whole.
But is it that way for everyone? What if you lead a loved one to nature and it doesn’t quite work out?
Tune in on April 18 for that story.
DENIS BULICHENKO: My name is Denis Bulichenko. And everything started in 2015 when I moved to Italy.
WILLOW: Denis is the founder of PeakVisor, our presenting sponsor this season.
DENIS: And I moved from a relatively flat area, so the mountains were like really, really exciting thing for me.
WILLOW: So Denis starts hiking. A lot. And he takes his daughter with him.
DENIS: She was kind of really curious, asking me all the time, “What’s the name of that mountain?”
WILLOW: What’s the name of that mountain?
It’s a question we ask ourselves a lot if we spend time in the backcountry. And oftentimes, it’s hard to answer. Because our hiking maps often don’t go far enough.
So, how do you get around that? Well, if you’re Denis, you create a new app. And yes — you guessed it — the app he created is PeakVisor.
PeakVisor helps you identify mountains. And it also has detailed maps for planning your adventures.
If you’d like to be a superhero of outdoor navigation, check out PeakVisor in the app store. You just might love it.
Out There is produced by me, Willow Belden. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
Special thanks to all of you who are supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Jenn Hess, Todd Oyen, Adam Milgrom, Paul Barach, Soledad Montanes Ordovas, Deana Fleming, Eric Biederman, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, Walter Mugdan, Vivienne Lenk, and Deb and Vince Garcia. You all are the best!
We’ll see you in two weeks. And in the meantime, have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.
Credits
Story and sound design by Samia Bouzid
Story editing by Willow Belden
Special thanks to Alessondra Springmann for use of audio from Arecibo
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This episode sponsored by PeakVisor
