Phil Plait

How it started.

A look at Saturn through his father’s small telescope hooked Phil on astronomy as a child. He went on to earn a PhD at the University of Virginia and worked at NASA Goddard on Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. At Sonoma State University, he developed educational activities with NASA funding.

Becoming the Bad Astronomer.

Phil began writing about astronomy on the web in 1993. Bad Astronomy tackled misconceptions, from everyday sky questions to astrology and Moon-landing conspiracy claims. His rebuttal of a Fox television special questioning the Apollo landings brought substantial traffic to the site. The nickname grew out of that work explaining where astronomy goes wrong.

Books and a classroom for everyone.

Bad Astronomy became a book in 2002, followed by Death from the Skies! in 2008. He later wrote and hosted Crash Course Astronomy, which began in January 2015. Under Alien Skies, published in 2023, takes readers on imagined visits to other worlds, using real science to explain what they would see.