Like many of the thousands of people at the Great Lakes Science Center on Monday, eclipse glasses in hand, Josh Pepper waited patiently for the moment when all eyes shifted to the sky. He answered questions about the eclipse and science at the NASA Village at the science center. The reverence for the topic shined through his genuine smile and hearty laugh.
After years of study, Josh said he is doing what excites him the most.
"I think the biggest challenge for people understanding about astronomy in the universe is the fact that the scales are so vast that they're dealing with numbers they're not used to dealing with,” said Pepper.
For hours on Monday, Pepper helped people make sense of science. A topic he developed a passion for early on.
"Rock collecting and learning about dinosaurs the way kids do," Pepper said of his early science memories.
But there was an even bigger influence than T-Rex: his father.
Stephen Pepper, Josh’s dad, began his career at NASA in 1966.
“It was really research,” Stephen Pepper said, “and the results of that research went into journal articles."
It was more than academic journal articles. Lubrication systems engineered by Stephen Pepper helped NASA on voyages to space.
“In the Galileo mission to Jupiter — now, that was a very ambitious mission — one of the parts of the spacecraft was to expand an antenna,” Stephen said. "That antenna refused to expand."
The elder Pepper's group found a solution. And according to NASA, Galileo was carried into the Earth's orbit on October 18, 1989.
The Galileo mission, according to Stephen, was not the pinnacle of his career.
“Actually, there was another moment,” said Stephen Pepper. “That is a contemporary mission. The current mission is the Curiosity Rover on Mars."
It was that kind of talk about space and the planets that nourished Josh’s interest in science when he was growing up.
The younger Pepper studied physics at Princeton University later earning a doctorate at The Ohio State University. Now he's an associate professor of physics at Leigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania — his father's alma mater.
Now, on a sabbatical from Lehigh, Josh calls himself a bureaucrat. He assists engineers and researchers at NASA and runs logistics.
His focus is exoplanets, planets beyond our solar system. One of the ways to find them is solar eclipses.
"We discover exoplanets," Josh said. "One of the ways we discover them is by staring at lots of stars, and then waiting to see if any of the stars dim a little bit."
But work on any exoplanets found during the eclipse will come later. After all, Josh's return visit to Northeast Ohio wasn't just a celestial celebration.
"Of course, my father is here," Josh Pepper explains. "He's turning 87 years old the day before the eclipse. And it's just a perfect confluence of events to celebrate family and the work that we do and just be together."
Neither of the doctors Pepper had seen a solar eclipse in person in full totality until Monday.
“This is amazing," Josh Pepper said during totality. "I can’t believe it. I'm so glad I came here for this."
In this case, the stars aligned to bring the father and son together to share their love of science. This time, however, they shared it not just with each other but with the many people at the eclipse party who tapped on Josh's shoulder, hungry to learn more.
