The Physician Who Went Back to School
For most people, finishing medical school, internship, and residency is enough school for one lifetime.
Apparently, I didn't get that memo.
After leaving the Army, I missed being in uniform more than I expected. Eventually I found my way back through the Civil Air Patrol. This time, I was flying. I served as a pilot and later became a squadron commander.
Aviation had always appealed to me. There is something very satisfying about an airplane because it is completely indifferent to confidence. You can believe as strongly as you want that the weather is good enough, that the fuel will last, or that your calculations are right.
The airplane doesn't care.
Physics gets the final vote.
That probably explains part of what happened next. At some point, I realized that the questions I enjoyed most were not limited to medicine. Why does an orbit have the shape it does? How do you determine where an object will be months from now? How much can you learn from a tiny point of light moving against a field of stars?
I had spent years studying physiology, disease, and the human body. Now I wanted to understand some of the machinery of the universe. So I did something that probably seemed a little odd for a practicing physician.
I went back to school.
I studied physics, mathematics, and astronomy. There was no career plan attached to it. I wasn't trying to become an astrophysicist or trade medicine for another profession. I simply wanted to understand more.
Being an older student turned out to be a very different experience. When you're twenty, school can feel like something you have to finish before life begins. When you go back later, you know exactly why you're sitting there. You're there because you want to know the answer.
Eventually, classroom astronomy turned into observational astronomy, and I built a home observatory in Clare, Michigan. Shamrock Banks Observatory was later assigned Minor Planet Center observatory code W24.
That little code meant quite a bit to me. It meant the observatory had become more than a telescope in the backyard. It was a recognized observing station capable of contributing positional measurements of asteroids and comets.
Some nights I image the Moon or point the telescope toward a galaxy, nebula, or star cluster. Other nights I track satellites moving through Earth orbit. Sometimes the work is more serious.
Asteroids and comets move. If you want to understand where one is going, you need accurate observations made at known times. One observer measures it tonight, another measures it somewhere else, and someone measures it tomorrow. Piece by piece, the orbit becomes clearer.
In July 2025, that became particularly memorable. The discovery of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS had just been announced. Two days later, I was able to image it from W24, measure its position, and submit the observation to the Minor Planet Center.
My observation was only one point among many submitted by amateur and professional astronomers around the world. Together, those observations helped refine the object's orbit.
I remember looking at that faint object on the screen and thinking about what it represented. It had come from somewhere outside our solar system and had been traveling through interstellar space for a very long time. For a few minutes on one night in Clare, Michigan, a telescope in my backyard was helping measure where it was.
That was pretty damn cool.
I also run an astronomy channel on YouTube and livestream observations from the observatory. Sometimes the purpose is research. Sometimes it is education. Sometimes it is simply showing somebody Saturn's rings or the surface of the Moon in real time and listening to them realize that they are not looking at a photograph. They are looking at it now.
That never gets old.
Astronomy also reinforced a habit I already knew from medicine: pay attention to what the evidence actually says. You may have an idea about where an asteroid should be. Then you measure it. If it isn't there, the universe doesn't owe you an explanation. Your prediction was wrong.
You go back, check the data, and figure out why.
Medicine can be like that too. A diagnosis may seem obvious until one laboratory result, one imaging study, or one piece of the timeline refuses to cooperate. That inconvenient observation is often the most useful one.
You don't throw it away. You follow it.
I went back to school because I wanted to understand more. Years later, I'm still working on that.