Dr. Philip Plait (a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer) is an astronomer who runs the website BadAstronomy.com. He works at the physics and astronomy department at Sonoma State University.

Biography

Dr. Plait grew up in the Washington, D.C. region and lived there for many years. He received his Ph.D in astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1994 with a thesis on SN 1987A, which he studied with the Supernova Intensive Study (SINS). He first worked with the COBE satellite and then with the STIS on the Hubble Space Telescope for five years.

Work

Dr. Plait currently performs web_based public outreach for GLAST, which will launch in 2005. He has appeared on the AM radio show Coast to Coast AM many times (but he does not wish to debate Richard Hoagland there) and has been featured on TV and on such websites as Space.com (http://www.space.com).

BadAstronomy.com

Badastronomy.com is a website dedicated to clearing up public misconceptions about astronomy and space science in movies, the news, print, and on the Internet. It also contains Plait's debunkings of several fringe theories related to space and astronomy, such as Planet X, Richard Hoagland's writings, and most famously, the moon hoax.

External links

• Bad Astronomy (http://www.badastronomy.com)
• Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board (http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/index.php)
• GLAST (http://www-glast.sonoma.edu/)
• STIS (http://www.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/stis/stis.pl?cat=core)
• Plait's page at Sonoma State University (http://epo.sonoma.edu/group/plait.html)