Category Archives: Astronomy

Five Year Mission Complete!

Today finds me at the Tell-Tale Steampunk Festival in York, Pennsylvania. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll drop in. You can learn more about the festival at https://telltalesteampunk.com/. Today, I’m excited to share the press release about the completion of the DESI project’s initial five-year mission with some personal annotations and observations.

Last Tuesday night, the 5,000 fiber-optic eyes of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) swiveled onto a patch of sky near the Little Dipper. Roughly every 20 minutes, they locked on to distant pinpricks of light, gathering photons that had traveled toward Earth for billions of years. When the sun rose, collaborators marked completion of a major milestone: successfully surveying all of the area in DESI’s originally planned map of the universe. I helped to install DESI and then was involved in nightly operations of the instrument through the entire five years of the survey. In the photo below, you can see me with the Mayall Telescope.

The five-year survey, finished ahead of schedule and with vastly more data than expected, has produced the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made. Researchers use that map to explore dark energy, the fundamental ingredient that makes up about 70% of our universe and is driving its accelerating expansion.

By comparing how galaxies clustered in the past with their distribution today, researchers have traced dark energy’s influence over 11 billion years of cosmic history. Surprising results using DESI’s first three years of data hinted that dark energy, once thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be evolving over time. With the full set of five years of data, researchers will have significantly more information to test whether that hint disappears or grows. If confirmed, it would mark a major shift in how we think about our universe and its potential fate, which hinges on the balance between matter and dark energy.

DESI’s quest to understand dark energy is a global endeavor. The international experiment brings together the expertise of more than 900 researchers (including 300 PhD students) from over 70 institutions. The project is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the instrument was constructed and is operated with funding from the DOE Office of Science. DESI is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (a program of NSF NOIRLab) in Arizona.

DESI has now measured cosmological data for six times as many galaxies and quasars as all previous measurements combined. The collaboration will immediately begin processing the completed dataset, with the first dark energy results from DESI’s full five-year survey expected in 2027. In the meantime, DESI scientists continue to analyze the survey’s first three years of data, refining dark energy measurements and producing additional results on the structure and evolution of the universe, with several papers planned later this year.

An Observing Machine

DESI began collecting data in May 2021. Since then, the instrument has far surpassed the collaboration’s original goals. The plan was to capture light from 34 million galaxies and quasars (extremely distant yet bright objects with black holes at their cores) over the five-year sky survey. DESI instead observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and 20 million stars.

The project’s success is even more impressive in light of several challenges. DESI is a complicated machine with thousands of parts to maintain. In 2020, final tests of the instrument were interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Contreras Fire swept over Kitt Peak but, through the efforts of firefighters and staff, did not damage the telescope. Recovery efforts were slowed by monsoons and mudslides.

To map objects, researchers use specially-designed software to optimize DESI observations and decide where to point the telescope. Robotic positioners precisely line up optical fibers that are accurate to within 10 microns, or less than the width of a hair. Ten spectrographs then measure and split the light into its separate colors to determine each object’s position, velocity, and chemical composition. Each night, roughly 80 gigabytes of data streams through ESnet, DOE’s high-speed science network, to supercomputers at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). Initial processing lets researchers do quality assurance and make any adjustments needed for the next night of observations.

I often think of DESI’s 5000 robot positioners as my army of robot minions. The animation below shows a 3D model of DESI’s focal plane. The movement of the 5,000 robotic positioners is coordinated so that they don’t bump into one another. The video was prepared by David Kirkby with support from the DESI collaboration.

Collaborators across the project found ways to make DESI more efficient. Efforts spanned telescope operations, tweaks to the instrument hardware, updates to software, observing protocols, methods to reduce the data, and more.

DESI is designed to make several overlapping passes of the sky to observe its full footprint (and sometimes make repeated observations of faint objects). The survey was so efficient, the team completed an entire additional pass over the sky for the “Bright-Time Survey,” which is carried out when reflected light from the moon hinders observations of faint and distant objects. All told, DESI made five passes during the Bright-Time Survey and seven during the Dark-Time Survey, covering about two-thirds of the northern night sky.

The Sky’s the Limit

DESI will continue observations through 2028 and grow its map by about 20%, from 14,000 square degrees to 17,000 square degrees. (For comparison, the moon covers approximately 0.2 square degrees, and the full sky has over 41,000 square degrees). The extended map will cover parts of the sky that are more challenging to observe: areas that are closer to the plane of the Milky Way, where bright nearby stars can make it harder to see more distant objects, or further to the south, where the telescope must account for peering through more of Earth’s atmosphere.

This time-lapse prepared by Anand Raichoor with the support of the DESI collaboration shows the sky over Kitt Peak on February 12-13, 2024. On that night, DESI observed a record 41 tiles for the Dark-Time Survey. DESI’s planned five-year survey map is outlined in red, and the moving circle shows where the instrument pointed throughout the night. The Mayall Telescope that houses DESI is visible at the top of the image, just left of center.

The experiment will also revisit the existing area of the map to collect data from a new set of galaxies: more distant and faint “luminous red galaxies.” These will provide an even denser and more detailed map in the regions DESI has already covered, giving researchers a clearer picture of the universe’s history.

Researchers will also study nearby dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, bands of stars torn from smaller galaxies by the Milky Way’s gravity. The hope is to better understand dark matter, the invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the mass in the universe but has never been directly detected.

The extended map is already underway. When it became clear that DESI would operate beyond its original survey plan, researchers began interleaving the new observations with the ongoing DESI survey to optimize the use of telescope time and keep the instrument from sitting idle.

Wild Wild West Con 14

The Wild Wild West Con Steampunk convention will be running from Thursday, March 19 through Sunday, March 22 at the Westward Look Resort in Tucson, Arizona.You can find all the details or buy tickets online at: https://www.wildwestcon.com/

War on the frontier!
Magic marches with the Clockwork Kingdom,
but the Rust Rebels will not bow.
At WWWC14, the frontier fractures and two legends rise, locked in epic conflict.

From gilded towers and spellbound halls, the Clockwork Kingdom rules with arcane grace. Nobles wield enchanted engines, mythical beasts stalk polished courtyards, and every tick of the clock hums with ancient magic.

But across the rust-choked wilds, the Rust Rebels surge: fierce, fearless, and free. They scavenge the wreckage, bend science to their will, and forge broken steel into revolution.

Two forces. One world on the brink. The choice is yours!

The Clockwork Kingdom vs. The Rust Rebels — Where Steampunk fairy tales collide with post-apocalyptic dystopia!

The Westward Look Resort is a beautiful place for this event. Nestled on 80 acres of the Sonoran Desert foothills, the historic Westward Look, originally a 1912 hacienda, offers steampunk-styled sanctuary with modern indulgences. Sip handcrafted cocktails by lush citrus and hummingbird gardens, unwind in sparkling pools or soak in hot tubs after a day of adventure, and relax in spacious casitas featuring private balconies overlooking Titan-like saguaros and the Catalina Mountains. With its full-service Sonoran Spa, eight tennis and pickleball courts, guided horseback and hiking trails, and over 30,000 ft of gathering spaces, this oasis becomes our Clockwork Kingdom’s grand stronghold – or the perfect hideout for the Rust Rebels!

Of course I’ll be involved in some events related to this year’s epic theme. My schedule is as follows:

Thursday, March 19

1pm – Mesa Room – Rebels of Astronomy. The 19th century was a time when astronomers were pushing boundaries and trying new things. Women were even getting into the act. Learn about the rebellious astronomers of the Victorian age and how they transformed our understanding of the planets and even the universe.

4pm – Canyon Room – The Author’s Panel. The authors of Wild Wild West Con gather and tell you about their latest work and answer your questions about being a writer.

5:30pm – Mesa Room – Drake & McTrowell’s Hot Potato School of Writing™. Join Chief Inspector Erasmus Drake and Dr. Sparky McTrowell as they host this gameshow where audience members and celebrity authors get together and cobble together an impromptu story based on fun story prompts. You can never tell where those prompts will lead!

Saturday, March 21

1pm – Canyon Room – Fairy Tales Revisited. Join Chief Inspector Erasmus Drake, Dr. Sparky McTrowell and I as we discuss our favorite fairy tales. We also look at approaches to steampunking them. How much work does this take to do it organically?

Of course, I will also have a vendor space at Wild Wild West Con where I’ll have my new collection of Vampire short stories, Vermillion Highways, the special collector’s USB Card of Museum of the Omniverse: Dragon Exhibit, and copies of Lyn McConchie’s The City – Sideways. You’ll find the booth in the Sonoran Room. I hope you’ll drop by so I can introduce you to your next favorite read!

The Aftermath of Blake’s 7

Back in 2024 while recovering from prostate cancer surgery, I watched all four seasons of the British science fiction series Blake’s 7. The show originally ran from 1978 through 1981 and told the story of a band of freedom fighters who stood up against an oppressive human Federation that had been colonizing the galaxy. The leader of the freedom fighters, Roj Blake, was portrayed by Gareth Thomas. His primary nemesis was an ambitious councilor who ultimately became Federation President named Servalan, portrayed by Jacqueline Pearce. The show was created by Terry Nation, who also created the alien race known as the Daleks for Doctor Who. One of the hallmarks of Blake’s 7 was that no one was safe. Heroes could die or move on. In fact, when it looked like his ship was doomed, Blake himself escaped to fight battles in other parts of the Federation, leaving the more ruthless Kerr Avon, played by Paul Darrow, to lead the freedom fighters for the next two seasons.

At the risk of spoilers for a TV series that ended nearly a quarter of a century ago, the series ended on a rather bleak note. It looked like out band of freedom fighters had met their match. Of course, the fight against oppressive regimes does not end and at least three characters had fates not set in stone. One of those characters was Kerr Avon and in 2013, actor Paul Darrow wrote a series of novels that tell how his character survived the events of the final episode and what happened to the Federation in the twenty years after that.

The first of those novels is titled Lucifer. As the novel opens, we find Avon stranded on an “island planet.” Apparently this is a moon-sized chunk of a planet that had been knocked from a larger world after a collision with another world. Of course, the astronomer in me questions how this island has an atmosphere left and how anyone survived the catastrophe that created the “island” but we’ll let that slide for the moment. The point is that Avon is trapped and when the Federation lands on this world to explore, he sees an opportunity to escape and reunite with one of the other lost members of the crew, the artificial intelligence known as Orac, voiced by Peter Tuddenham. The thing is, Orac is so advanced compared to other computers that whoever possesses him could be the most powerful person in the galaxy.

Meanwhile, we learn that President Servalan has been deposed and replaced by a council of four known as the Quartet. However, Servalan has not gone away entirely. She’s been under house arrest and pulls the strings of one of the members of the Quartet and is busily working to install a second puppet. When she learns that Avon is alive and trying to escape his island prison, she reasons that he must be trying to reunite with Orac, who had been presumed lost. For her, Orac could be a way for her to reclaim lost glory.

The book is told in three parts. The first part is set in the “present” of twenty years after the series ended. The second part takes us back to the end of the series and tells how Avon ended up on the island planet in a grand adventure that involves mercenaries, aliens, and a second major Earth faction, competing with the Federation. Finally, the book wraps up in the “present” as Avon and Servalan have their inevitable confrontation.

For me, the most interesting part of this book is that it gave us a more in-depth look at Earth’s political structure than the series ever did. It posits that there are still Western and Eastern power blocs. The Western bloc largely moved out into space as a colonial power and became the Federation. The Eastern bloc largely took over Earth itself. However, the Eastern bloc now has designs on moving out into space to gain its own resources. Both blocs have designs on Orac, which means they both want Avon to lead them to him. However, Avon has always had his own agenda and wants little to do with either bloc.

Blake’s 7, like many science fiction novels and series of its time, recognized that artificial intelligence would eventually become something to be reconned with. Orac was always portrayed as a willful machine, but one ultimately at the control of the humans he serves. The characterization is especially interesting given that human society is shown to still have servant classes.

If you’ve watched Blake’s 7 and want to know what happened after the end of the series, this novel presents interesting possibilities as imagined by one of the shows stars, who also talked to those who might have written revivals of the show. As I note, the science seems dubious at points and some of the technology seems dated. Still, it’s the characters that made me a fan of the series and Darrow handles them well. I look forward to seeing where the series goes in the second novel of his trilogy, Lucifer: Revelation.

If you would like to explore my own foray into the worlds of galactic politics, you might enjoy my Space Pirates’ Legacy series. you can learn more about it at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#pirate_legacy

Short Stories for Winters’ Long Nights

The annual Smashwords End of Year Sale is underway. Many of Hadrosaur’s titles are on sale and I’ll be highlighting them here at the Web Journal. The discounts are automatically applied at checkout. One of the things I love about Smashwords is that they provide ebooks in all popular formats and they’re DRM free, so you can download them to your favorite device or gift them to friends without worrying about what e-reader they prefer. If you are shopping for a friend, just click “Give as a Gift” when you visit the Smashwords links!

Today, I’m featuring some great anthologies for those times when you want to curl up by a fire and enjoy an author’s work in one sitting. As an extra special treat, read to the bottom to learn about a story I’m giving away as a holiday gift!

Exchange Students

In Exchange Students you can study abroad! See new places! Meet new people!

In our exchange student program, you can literally study anywhere or anywhen you can imagine. We’ll send you to new planets. We’ll send you to new dimensions and realms of existence. We’ll send you through time itself!

Don’t believe me? This exciting anthology contains many tales of our thrilling and educational exchange student program. You’ll read tales of aliens coming to earth and humans traveling to alien worlds. You’ll meet a denizen of Hell who travels to Heaven. Some students will discover their super powers on their journey. Other students will have encounters with the undead. You’ll meet a law enforcement officer who travels to the realm of the fae to help solve a crime of truly interdimensional proportions.

Featuring twenty-two amazing stories by Roze Albina Ches, Jaleta Clegg, Ken Goldman, Paula Hammond, Sheila Hartney, Chisto Healy, Joachim Heijndermans, Sean Jones, Tim Kane, Alden Loveshade, Tim McDaniel, J Louis Messina, Jennifer Moore, Brian Gene Olson, David B. Riley, Katherine Quevedo, Holly Schofield, Jonathan Shipley, Lesley L. Smith, Emily Martha Sorensen, Margret A. Treiber and Sherry Yuan.

Exchange Students is available for half off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1005851.

A Kepler’s Dozen

A Kepler’s Dozen is an anthology of action-packed, mysterious, and humorous stories all based on real planets discovered by the NASA Kepler mission. Edited by and contributing stories are David Lee Summers, author of The Pirates of Sufiro, and Steve B. Howell, project scientist for the Kepler mission. Whether on a prison colony, in a fast escape from the authorities, or encircling a binary star, thirteen exoplanet stories written by authors such as Mike Brotherton, Laura Givens, and J Alan Erwine will amuse, frighten, and intrigue you while you share fantasy adventures among Kepler’s real-life planets.

“… the stories represent a glimpse of where science fiction might go if real exoplanets are taken as inspiration.” Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today

You can buy A Kepler’s Dozen for half off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/325583.

Kepler’s Cowboys

  • NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered thousands of new planets.
  • Visiting, much less settling, those worlds will provide innumerable challenges.
  • The men and women who make the journey will be those who don’t fear the odds.
  • They’ll be Kepler’s Cowboys.

Saddle up and take an unforgettable journey to distant star systems. Meet new life forms—some willing to be your friend and others who will see you as the invader. Fight for justice in a lawless frontier. Go on a quest for a few dollars more. David Lee Summers, author of the popular Clockwork Legion novels, and Steve B. Howell, head of the Space Sciences and Astrobiology Division at NASA Ames Research Center, have edited this exciting, fun, and rollicking anthology of fourteen stories and five poems by such authors as Patrick Thomas, Jaleta Clegg, Anthony R. Cardno, L.J. Bonham, and many more!

“If you’re in the mood for science fiction that’s heavy on the science, pore over this enjoyable collection that takes exoplanets and the American West as its inspirations. The stories and poems in Kepler’s Cowboys imagine wild and risky futures for the first generations of exoplanet explorers as they grapple with harsh environments, tight quarters, aliens, and one another.” Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today.

Kepler’s Cowboys is available for half off the cover price at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/698694.

The Slayers

Dragon bellies are full of powerful carbide that allows them to breathe fire. Dragon carbide is a valuable treasure. Rado is a young man who sails the winds in a flyer. He signs aboard a mighty dirigible called the Slayer to hunt dragons. However, he soon learns that Captain Obrey will not rest until he strips the teeth and carbide from a mighty gold dragon. First published in 2001, “The Slayers” is a fun retelling of Moby Dick in a fantasy world with dragons.

This story was first published in the August 2001 issue of Realms of Fantasy Magazine. This is a special tenth anniversary ebook edition and I’m giving it away absolutely free. Just visit: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/58303

Although it’s not part of the Smashwords sale, “The Slayers” is also part of the exciting cinematic audio adventure, The Museum of the Omniverse: Dragon Exhibit. Our special collector’s USB card edition is on sale for 15% off the cover price through this weekend at: https://hadrosaur.com/MOTO-Dragon-USB.php

Sailing Deep Sky

I often gravitate to songs and music that either tell stories through their lyrics or help me envision stories through their rhythms. So, when I first learned about the genre of Victorian-inspired retrofuturism known as steampunk and began to explore all its possibilities it should come as no surprise that I would soon begin to follow the band Abney Park. Lead singer and songwriter “Captain” Robert Brown has a strong narrative sense in his lyrics and it was clear from the outset that he’d envisioned a fully formed steampunk world when he wrote his songs. As such, I was delighted when he began to write about this world in his Airship Pirates Chronicles novels. Now, Captain Robert has stepped into the future of his own imaginary world to bring us the novel Sailing Deep Sky.

Captain Robert recently ran a Kickstarter campaign for Abney Park’s latest album, Cataclysm. One of the perks offered was the new novel, which I picked up as an audiobook because I love listening to Captain Robert tell his own stories. What’s more, I thought this would be a great story for my drive from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Kitt Peak in Arizona. The audiobook clocked in at just about 4.5 hours, which was just about perfect and it did make one of my trips literally fly by! Because I did get this as an audiobook, I’ll note that I may misspell some character names.

The novel opens in an already-dystopian future, around the time of the Airship Pirates Chronicles. A shipwright’s apprentice is also an amateur astronomer and he’s watching as a large object appears and races toward the moon, ultimately colliding with it. The moon is shattered and storms rage across the face of the Earth. Eventually, the shattered bits of moon and asteroid settle into orbit as a ring. Pieces of asteroid and moon that fall to Earth prove to have amazing, almost magical properties, so now the race is on to build ships that can go into orbit to learn what’s there and retrieve anything people can use. Soon, the shipwright is contracted to build the best possible ship he can for an admiral in one of earth’s navies.

Now, we jump ahead 50 years and meet a young man named Wenge who travels with his father, an itinerant doctor. The two are stopped and a young woman asks for their help. Her father has been shot! When Wenge and his father arrive, they discover the gunman still on the scene. They try to help the young woman’s father, but the gunman is in no mood to be helpful and shoots the doctor. Eventually Wenge and his father get away, but the doctor has a bullet lodged in his spine and things will only get worse if he can’t get help. Fortunately, some of the rocks found in orbit have been discovered to have anti-gravity properties, which may help the doctor get around, and possibly even recover. So, Wenge goes on a quest to get one of these new-fangled sky ships so he can go to orbit and recover some of these rocks to help his father. Along the way, he must traverse part of the Grand Canyon by cable car. There he meets a young woman named Nixie and her automaton companion Ray. Nixie and Ray help Wenge fend off bandits and then join up with him to keep him out of trouble. They introduce Wenge to a large Polynesian named Toa who agrees to take them to a floating city where they’ve heard about a shipwright building a truly fabulous sky ship. It should come as no surprise that this connects us back to the events from the story’s beginning.

Sailing Deep Sky is by no means “hard” science fiction that adheres to the strictest laws of physics. However, we do get a rollicking good tale that evoked images from such diverse movies as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Serenity. I’ve always loved a bit of whimsy in my science fiction and the wooden “sky ship” in this story recalled the wattle-and-daub spacecraft in Gerry Anderson’s Lavender Castle. That noted, my favorite aspects of this story were the inclusion of some Hawaiian legends along with some reflections on the challenges and rewards of being the father to daughters. Both of those aspects felt like they came from Captain Roberts’ heart. You can find Sailing Deep Sky at the Abney Park website: https://abneypark.com/

If you’d like to delve into my steampunk worlds, some of which were inspired by Abney Park instrumentals, visit http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#clockwork_legion

Seven Magnificent Women

During my senior year at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, I spent a small part of every Friday traveling through the small town of Magdalena on my way to the Very Large Array radio telescope. where I worked on devices that would be used to seek out the best site for new millimeter array telescope. That telescope would ultimately be the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. More recently a dear friend recommended a book that opened in the town of Magdalena. In the book, the characters were just passing through on their way to bigger and scarier adventures in a fictional town called Tierra de Cobre. My friend, the brilliant raconteur and seamstress Madame Askew, also said the book reminded her of my own novel Owl Dance.

The book in question is Terror at Tierra de Cobre by Michael Merriam and published by Queen of Swords Press. This high-octane novella is effectively a retelling of The Magnificent Seven with women taking the roles of the heroic fighters. A monster from Jicarilla Apache lore serves as the villain. As the story begins, we learn that copper miners found the monster known as the Sihuanaba buried deep underground. It soon began turning the miners into zombies. Any men who went out to confront the zombies and the Sihuanaba just fed the ranks of the zombies. This leads those left behind in Tierra de Cobre to seek out women adventurers to combat the evil. Anyone who knows the story of The Magnificent Seven or Seven Samurai will know the overall story, but the joy here is seeing our familiar characters reinterpreted as women. We have some traditional gun-fighting women, but we also have a nun who has left her order to fight monsters, a fortune-telling gypsy, and a plucky reporter who has steampunkish communications gadget that my inventor, Professor Maravilla would have enjoyed getting his hands on.

I believe I’ve seen just about every incarnation of The Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai made ranging from Kurasawa’s original to the steampunk anime Samurai 7 and from both westerns to Roger Corman’s campy science fictional Battle Beyond the Stars. I believe that the Sihuanaba is by far the best villain of any of these. The Sihuanaba is truly terrifying and Merriam handles it well, by keeping it in the shadows for much of the novella, allowing the zombies to do the dirty work. Making the villain a literal monster and shifting the story into weird western territory really breathed new life in it and I thoroughly enjoyed this new take on a classic storyline. You can find the novel at: https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Tierra-Cobre-Michael-Merriam/dp/B0CVV9DKPV

I appreciate Madame Askew’s comparison and it’s certainly true that Terror at Tierra de Cobre is a story that feels like it could exist in the same world as Ramon Morales, Fatemeh Karimi and the Clockwork Legion. If you want to check out my Clockwork Legion series, you can learn more at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#clockwork_legion. Having noted that, Merriam’s novel also reminded me of The Astronomer’s Crypt with its theme of unearthing an ancient evil warned about in Apache stories. You can learn more about that novel at: http://davidleesummers.com/Astronomers-Crypt.html

Travel to New Worlds!

At Kitt Peak National Observatory, I’m proud to support a NASA-funded instrument called NEID deployed at the WIYN Telescope. NEID’s job is to gather data on known exoplanets, getting better information about orbits, sizes, and masses, plus following up on some exoplanet candidates initially detected by space-based telescopes such as Kepler and TESS. Steve Howell, who served as Kepler’s Project Scientist, was at one time WIYN’s Telescope Scientist. He came to me a few years ago and wondered if we could assemble an anthology where science fiction writers told stories on planets discovered by Kepler. The idea was to imagine these planets as places in a way that paintings alone couldn’t. We hoped to make real exoplanets into places people could imagine visiting in much the same way as people learned to see Mars as a real place back in the nineteenth century. The first anthology was called A Kepler’s Dozen and we followed it up a couple of years later with Kepler’s Cowboys.

After doing both of these anthologies, Sheila Hartney approached me and asked if she could edit an anthology. I had her pitch some ideas to me and the one I chose was called Exchange Students. If a story imagined an exchange student visiting another world, another time, or another dimension, we’d consider it.

All three of our anthologies are on sale for half off the cover price as part of the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale. This marks my last post promoting the 2025 Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale. Thanks for reading the posts about the books I publish through Hadrosaur Productions this month. I’m proud of all of them. Read on to get more details about the books.

A Kepler’s Dozen

A Kepler’s Dozen is an anthology of action-packed, mysterious, and humorous stories all based on real planets discovered by the NASA Kepler mission. Edited by and contributing stories are David Lee Summers, author of The Pirates of Sufiro, and Steve B. Howell, project scientist for the Kepler mission. Whether on a prison colony, in a fast escape from the authorities, or encircling a binary star, thirteen exoplanet stories written by authors such as Mike Brotherton, Laura Givens, and J Alan Erwine will amuse, frighten, and intrigue you while you share fantasy adventures among Kepler’s real-life planets.

“… the stories represent a glimpse of where science fiction might go if real exoplanets are taken as inspiration.” Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today

Also, in case you missed it, A Kepler’s Dozen was mentioned in the July/August issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. In the article “Biosignatures – The Biggest Blunder in SF,” author Valentin D. Ivanov discusses how science fiction routinely gets the process of planet discovery, and understanding which planets may have life, wrong. He cites A Kepler’s Dozen as one of the anthologies that gets it right.

You can buy A Kepler’s Dozen for half off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/325583. Coupon code SSW50 should be applied automatically at checkout.

Kepler’s Cowboys

  • NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered thousands of new planets.
  • Visiting, much less settling, those worlds will provide innumerable challenges.
  • The men and women who make the journey will be those who don’t fear the odds.
  • They’ll be Kepler’s Cowboys.

Saddle up and take an unforgettable journey to distant star systems. Meet new life forms—some willing to be your friend and others who will see you as the invader. Fight for justice in a lawless frontier. Go on a quest for a few dollars more. David Lee Summers, author of the popular Clockwork Legion novels, and Steve B. Howell, head of the Space Sciences and Astrobiology Division at NASA Ames Research Center, have edited this exciting, fun, and rollicking anthology of fourteen stories and five poems by such authors as Patrick Thomas, Jaleta Clegg, Anthony R. Cardno, L.J. Bonham, and many more!

“If you’re in the mood for science fiction that’s heavy on the science, pore over this enjoyable collection that takes exoplanets and the American West as its inspirations. The stories and poems in Kepler’s Cowboys imagine wild and risky futures for the first generations of exoplanet explorers as they grapple with harsh environments, tight quarters, aliens, and one another.” Melinda Baldwin, Physics Today.

Kepler’s Cowboys is available for half the cover price at Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/698694. Coupon code SSW50 should be applied automatically on checkout.

Exchange Students

In our exchange student program, you can literally study anywhere or anywhen you can imagine. We’ll send you to new planets. We’ll send you to new dimensions and realms of existence. We’ll send you through time itself!

Don’t believe me? This exciting anthology contains many tales of our thrilling and educational exchange student program. You’ll read tales of aliens coming to earth and humans traveling to alien worlds. You’ll meet a denizen of Hell who travels to Heaven. Some students will discover their super powers on their journey. Other students will have encounters with the undead. You’ll meet a law enforcement officer who travels to the realm of the fae to help solve a crime of truly interdimensional proportions.

Featuring twenty-two amazing stories by Roze Albina Ches, Jaleta Clegg, Ken Goldman, Paula Hammond, Sheila Hartney, Chisto Healy, Joachim Heijndermans, Sean Jones, Tim Kane, Alden Loveshade, Tim McDaniel, J Louis Messina, Jennifer Moore, Brian Gene Olson, David B. Riley, Katherine Quevedo, Holly Schofield, Jonathan Shipley, Lesley L. Smith, Emily Martha Sorensen, Margret A. Treiber and Sherry Yuan

Exchange Students is available for half off the cover price at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1005851. Coupon code SSW50 should be applied automatically on checkout.

Surviving Prostate Cancer – Year One

It’s been just over a year since I had a radical prostatectomy to deal with prostate cancer. I recently had my one-year check up with my surgeon and all indications are that I’m doing extremely well and, so far, all indications are that the cancer is gone for good. The most challenging part of the process was the first month of surgical recovery. After that, I did have several months of physical therapy. I’ll spare you the details, but if you are facing all this for yourself, I do strongly recommend the book Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer, which should be available at your favorite library or bookstore. Written by a team of doctors based at the Johns Hopkins Prostate Cancer Center, it did a great job of telling me what to expect and gave me great questions to ask. At this point, I’m pretty much living my life as I did before surgery, though I am following up on some relatively minor non-cancer concerns that were uncovered in the preparation for the surgery and during surgery.

One thing I have done over the last couple of weeks is to look back at what I’ve accomplished in the year since I had my prostate surgery. I am really proud to have published four separate titles which include works by some great authors. These include Beyond Mystique by Don Braden, The Far Side of the Wild West by Lyn McConchie, Lost Sons: The Fall of New Atlantis by Greg Ballan, and the audio anthology The Museum of the Omniverse: Dragon Exhibit which includes stories by Timothy Zahn, Carol Hightshoe, Patrick Thomas, and Jeremiah Lynch alongside two of my stories. I also wrote the short story “The Last Priestess” which appeared in the anthology An Assembly of Monsters and collaborated on a short story collection which is under consideration with another publisher. I’m currently working to finish publication of Greg Ballan’s Lost Sons and I’ve started work on a new Museum of the Omniverse volume. I have also been asked to write a new short story for a forthcoming anthology.

I should note that Beyond Mystique, The Far Side of the Wild West, and Lost Sons: The Fall of New Atlantis will all be on sale for half the cover price starting on July 1 at Smashwords. I’ll be featuring each of them over the course of the month, but you can search on any of them starting at July 1 when the sale starts. Also, while we’re looking ahead at future events, I’ll be signing my vampire novels at Boutique du Vampyre in New Orleans on August 9. If you’ll be in the area, mark your calendars! I’ll be sure to post more details early in August.

Work at Kitt Peak National Observatory continues to go well as we enter year five of the Dark Energy Spectrographic Survey at the Mayall 4-meter telescope and continue hunting for Exoplanets with the WIYN telescope. I have also begun work on modernizing and upgrading one of the online manuals for the telescope operators.

Earlier this year, I heard an interesting and sad podcast from a young person who had been diagnosed with cancer. She discussed feeling ghosted by all her friends when she needed them the most. They didn’t want to deal with this traumatic experience that happened with one of their peers. I was fortunate that I did not feel this. Likely because I am in my 50s, my friends and work colleagues were all there to support me at a difficult time of my life. I even heard from people I didn’t expect to hear from and it was very touching.

That said, a year later, I do feel a certain kind of “ghosting” that does trouble me somewhat. In effect, now that I’ve recovered, there seems to be an assumption that I want to put the whole experience behind me and just move on with my life as though none of this ever happened. I call it “experience ghosting” and it amounts to an implicit assumption that this major experience in my life shouldn’t have affected me aside from costing me some time. In point of fact, the experience brought my mortality into focus and, while I don’t expect to die anytime soon, there are things I’d like to do while I’m able such as travel more and work on some of my non-writing art. I’m still working out the best ways to achieve those life goals along with some others. I don’t really need advice for how to do this or anyone’s permission, just some understanding that this old dog still has plenty of new tricks he’d like to learn along with plenty of new adventures to experience. I feel blessed to have survived this experience and see it as a call to turn the page and start the next chapter in my life.

Space Patrol Orion

One of the things I enjoy about working at Kitt Peak National Observatory is that I get to work with people from all around the world. Recently, I spent a few nights working on the DESI project with an astronomer who grew up in Germany. When he learned that I write science fiction, his eyes lit up and he told me about his favorite science fiction series from childhood. It was one I hadn’t encountered before called Raumpatrouille Orion, which translates to Space Patrol Orion in English. He then pointed out that episodes are on YouTube, but he warned me they’re in German. I still figured I’d give it a try. My German might be rusty, but I can usually follow along with little problem. Fortunately, it turns out subtitled episodes are available on YouTube, so I didn’t have to struggle at all.

Raumpatrouille Orion debuted in 1966 very soon after Star Trek debuted on US television. This is notable as the shows are similar. Raumpatrouille Orion introduces us to the five crewmembers of the Orion 7, of the Rapid Attack Space Unit. These are Major Cliff Alister McClane in command of the flying-saucer-shaped craft, Lt. Mario diMonti who serves as gunner and computer specialist, Lt. Atan Shubashi who serves as astrogator, Lt. Helga Legrelle who serves as surveillance and communication officer, and Lt. Hasso Sigbjörnson who serves as chief mechanic/engineer. When McClane makes an unauthorized, but difficult landing on a new world, the Orion 7 is reassigned from the Rapid Attack Space Unit under the command of General Lydia Van Dyke to the Space Patrol under General Winston Wamsler. What’s more, he’s assigned a Security Service watchdog named Tamara Jagellovsk. Her role is to effectively serve as McClane’s executive officer. Already, I suspect people can see some similarities with Star Trek. We have a notable captain who sometimes bucks the system. Like Star Trek’s first pilot, we have a woman as executive officer. In fact, like the Enterprise in the original series, women comprise one-third of the total crew compliment. We have a crew from places all around the world, including Russia, Japan and the United States, even though all the actors were either German or Austrian. Each episode even opens with a narration telling us a little about the Orion’s mission. Although the series only ran for seven episodes it achieved a cult status and is still known today. There was even a movie, assembled from scenes of the original, released in 2003.

The Orion’s mission is a combination of Earth defense and, after reassignment, routine maintenance tasks and errands to colony worlds. In their first mission after reassignment, the Orion’s crew encounter a race of human-shaped energy beings they nickname the “frogs.” The frogs soon demonstrate their hostility to humans along with their technical superiority. In the second episode of the series, they effectively ignite a planet into a ball of fire and send it hurtling toward the Earth. In the story, they called it a “supernova” which made me groan a little. Given my background, I knew that supernovae were generally accepted to be exploding stars by 1966. That said, I could believe that a writer in 1966 who only knew of supernovae from years before in school might reasonably call the sudden appearance of a star-like object a supernova as well. As the series progresses, the frogs grow more cunning and devious, finding ways to brainwash humans and use them as secret agents. Meanwhile, humanity develops a weapon they call by the English word “Overkill” to combat the frogs.

Not all episodes pit humans against frogs. In one episode, the crew of the Orion must take supplies to a mining colony only to find it’s been taken over by rogue robots. The episode does feel a lot like the first season Star Trek episode “The Devil in the Dark” where miners are beset by the rock-dissolving creature called the horta. In another episode, McClane is sent to investigate why the sun’s energy has increased, threatening life on Earth. At first, the culprit is believed to be the frogs, but actually proves to be a colony run by women who are trying to increase the sun’s output for their benefit, not realizing the harm to Earth. The “planet of women” trope is an old one in science fiction. Star Trek even went there in the animated episode “The Lorelei Signal.” It even looked like the episode would fall into the worst aspects of the trope when McClane is incredulous that women run the planet. Why should this bother him? After all, his previous commander who he wants to work with again is a woman! Still, the episode managed to subvert the trope by showing that the women actually were the more peaceful party and are the ones who want to negotiate a mutually beneficial solution with Earth and agree that McClane should serve as special envoy.

So why are Raumpatrouille Orion and Star Trek so similar in many ways? One could argue that it was simply the zeitgeist of the time. Many people wanted to imagine a future with a generally peaceful and unified humanity that had lofty goals like exploring space, an attitude I wish more of us shared today. That said, Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, has gone on record saying he was strongly influenced by the film Forbidden Planet. To me, Raumpatrouille Orion also feels like elements were inspired by Forbidden Planet. If you want to watch and make your own judgement, you can find the series with English subtitles at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEDIPudmkIBIAIR08lTCaH6U-DArsW_4n

My Space Pirates’ Legacy series was influenced by both Forbidden Planet and Star Trek. That said, I noticed that the uniforms I describe for the military resemble the uniforms the Orion crew wear. Also Raumpatrouille Orion is set in the thirty-first century, much like my book series. You can learn more about the Space Pirates’ Legacy series at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#pirate_legacy

Anniversary and Astronomy

Yesterday, my wife and I had our 35th wedding anniversary. Ten days before that, on May 9, I had been invited to give a presentation about Kitt Peak’s role in exoplanet searches to the Huachuca Astronomy Club in Sierra Vista, Arizona. We took advantage of the timing for the presentation to make an early getaway for our anniversary. Sierra Vista is in Cochise County, not far away from the historic copper-mining town, Bisbee, which my wife and I have enjoyed visiting numerous times. In fact, when we lived in Arizona in the mid-1990s, we seriously considered moving there. So, we secured a room at one of our favorite hotels and celebrated our anniversary a little early with a nice getaway.

Main Street, Bisbee, Arizona

I find Bisbee a town that has inspired elements from my writing. The mine tour there is very good and inspired some of the scenes set in the mines on the planet Sufiro in my Space Pirates’ Legacy novels. Located in a mountainous canyon, the feeling of the town helped to inspired the fictional Toledo, New Mexico in The Astronomer’s Crypt. That said, in all of our trips to Bisbee, we realized we had never actually visited their history museum. We finally corrected that this time. It was an interesting visit. Bisbee was founded in the 1880s and really boomed at the turn of the 20th century when copper wire began to be in demand around the country. It was prosperous at the time Arizona and New Mexico were going through statehood and I learned some details about that process I hadn’t known before. At it’s height, Bisbee witnessed the women’s suffrage movement. Of course, labor movements were in full swing and Bisbee’s mines were very much part of that.

Brewery Gulch as seen by Ted DeGrazia in 1940

One thing I didn’t know about Bisbee was that painter Ted DeGrazia lived there before he ultimately made his home in Tucson. DeGrazia was one of my mom’s favorite painters and she’d been thrilled in the 1990s our first apartment turned out to be just down the road from his Gallery of the Sun. The museum in Bisbee featured a show with several of DeGrazia’s paintings from his time living in Bisbee. The museum shop had some prints on sale, so I picked up one showing Brewer’s Gulch at night in 1940. Because that’s the neighborhood my wife and I tend to stay in, I picked up the print for my room at Kitt Peak. There’s a lot of nice associations with that painting and I have a feeling it might inspire a story or two.

Rings from Bisbee

When my wife and I married, we made a deliberate choice to keep our wedding bands simple for a number of reasons. Neither one of us particularly like large rings that stand out from the finger because they tend to interfere with any detail work we might be doing. What’s more, both of us recognize that we have periods of absent-mindedness and knew that we might well misplace a ring at some point. So, our original rings were simple silver bands that Kumie made. They were very distinctive and people often remarked on them, but sure enough over the course of 35 years, we managed to misplace them. We do still have a third one she made at the time, which we have now placed in a safe space so we can remember them. So, one special thing we did in Bisbee was find some new, simple but lovely wedding rings to mark our years together and give us matching rings again.

Huachuca Astronomy Club Presentation

Finally, we had a really nice time with the folks from the Huachuca Astronomy Club. They took us out to dinner and then I gave the presentation at the Cochise Community College. There was a good crowd and they asked some good, thoughtful questions. I spoke about how NEID looks for Exoplanets by looking at very tiny red and blue shifts in the star’s spectrum. I also spoke about recent NEID discoveries, such as a planet bigger than Jupiter that is far less dense than water. There’s also a Jupiter sized planet with a very elongated orbit. It’s believed that could be a large planet that formed in that star’s outer solar system that is now moving in to a close orbit, which might explain so-called hot Jupiters we find in other solar systems. I was also able to discuss how NEID was able to confirm one of the first planet discoveries by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, which precisely measures stars’ positions on the sky. Gaia actually has found planet candidates by seeing tiny motions in the positions of the stars themselves! It’s all very exciting stuff and I’m really grateful to the Huachuca Astronomy Club for their hospitality and inviting me to speak to them.