John Vallerga - Special guest for Solar Week Spring 2008
UC Berkeley - Space Sciences Lab

I am an astrophysicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, Univ. of California, Berkeley. I specialize in the development of sensitive photon imaging detectors for astronomical telescopes, both in space and on the ground. I did my undergraduate work at Berkeley in Physics and received my Ph.D. in Astrophysics from M.I.T. in 1982. I have participated in many NASA astronomy missions, including the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope, the Far Ultraviolet Explorer, ALICE on the New Horizons Spacecraft to Pluto, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and many more. Recently, I have been awarded a multi-year grant by the National Science Foundation to develop high-speed optical detectors for use with adaptive optics systems. Adaptive optics systems allow large ground-based telescopes to correct for atmospheric turbulence in real time, resulting in images and spectra as good as the Hubble Space Telescope, but with much larger collecting area.

My astronomical research concentrates on the Local Interstellar Medium: the gas and dust between the nearby stars. He has measured the temperature, speed and direction of the interstellar “wind” flowing though the solar system as the Sun traverses nearby space.  I've authored or co-authored over 100 papers on advance instrumentation and astronomy.

Solar Energy

I have always been interested in solar energy and have had a solar photovoltaic array on my roof since 2001 which I installed myself (with help).

I also have an electric scooter that can get me to work and back.