Francis "Frank"
C. Fekel parlayed drawing constellations as
an art project in the 5th grade at Olivet
Elementary School (1960 graduate) into a
position as the latest staff astronomer in
the Center of Excellence in Information
Systems and Center for Automated Astronomy,
Tennessee State Univeristy, Nashville,
Tennessee. Along the way he detoured long
enough (35 years) to graduate from Bridgeton
High School and continued his limited
education in Cleveland, Ohio at Case Western
Reserve University where he was awarded a
B.S. degree in Astronomy after looking
through some telescopes. Seeking additional
peeks at the sky, he began graduate school at
University of Texas at Austin before being
interupted by a call from Uncle Sam who
sidetracked him with nearly four years of
Navy service. After much struggle he returned
to finish his M.A. degree in 1974 and his
astronomy Ph.D. in 1979 at the University of
Texas. Astronomy in the real world began with
a postdoc at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center, followed by a tour of teaching duty
at Vanderbilt University and postdoc at NASA
Marshall Space Flight Center. In need of
money to support his addiction to astronomy,
he returned to Nashville, TN, where he was
able to hoodwink the good people at TSU into
employing him.
Frank is interested in the
lives and characteristics of stars in the
solar neighborhood. He is particularly
captivated by binary and multiple stars
similar to the Sun, whose masses, radii,
chemical compositions, distances, and
evolutionary stages he tries to determine. He
peregrinates periodically to southern
Arizona, where telescopes seem to be as
common as Roadrunners and cacti, to collect
new ground-based data for analysis. His
latest work includes "Spectroscopy of
Close Multiple Stars and Speckle
Binaries," an observing project done at
Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson,
AZ and "Activity in Population II
Stars," which uses ultraviolet spectra
obtained with the International Ultraviolet
Explorer Satellite, a forerunner of the
Hubble Space Telescope. His research is
published with various collaborators in a
variety of scientific journals including The
Astronomical Journal, The Astrophysical
Journal, Astronomy and Astrophysics ( a
European journal) and Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society ( a British
journal). In the February 1996 issue of
"Astronomy", a publication more
accessible to the general public, some of his
research results and those of Greg Henry,
another TSU astronomer, were highlighted. For
more information see Frank Fekel's home page.
He currently lives alone on
the outskirts of rural America communicating
with his grown children by email. His
daughter Kim works for SABRE, a subsidiary of
American Airlines while his son Chad is in
his second year of gastronomic studies at
University of Delaware. When not plotting to
unravel the lives of stars he shares the
company of a lively girlfriend while
communing with nature as a bird watcher. When
the inhospitable weather precludes such
pursuits, he reads science fiction or
explores the mysteries of the lives of his
forefathers.
