Hi I'm Craig DeForest and I play for a living. No, really. As a scientist, I sometimes feel like the luckiest guy in the world. Sure, we work long hours--sometimes I'll notice I'm getting tired and discover that I've been working all day and it's 11 o'clock at night--but that's because it's heady, exciting stuff to work with data and instruments and ideas.

I study the Sun with SOHO. I operate one of the instruments on the spacecraft, help other people come up with observing plans and get the data they want, manipulate images of the Sun to try to wrest new information out of them, help to publicize some of our results, and travel to distant places to work with other scientists on understanding our star. Well, no wonder I feel busy all the time!

As a solar astrophysicist, I don't wear a lab coat all the time and I don't talk like an egghead. You might even meet me on the street and not even know. I like to go sailing, to roller blade around the city, and to work on an old VW van that I own. I love reading science fiction--I think that, as a teenager, I read everything that Robert Heinlein ever wrote.