Vaughn W. Payne

Two lifetimes of looking closely.

I am a physician — PharmD, MD, FACC — with a career spanning clinical cardiology, pharmacy, and medical leadership in managed care, where I serve as a medical director and direct physician education programs. Medicine taught me to read faint signals carefully and to trust the discipline of method.

Astronomy is where that discipline goes at night. From my backyard observatory I run multiple imaging rigs on deep-sky targets, accumulating exposures across weeks — thirty, forty, fifty hours per object — and processing them into images that try to honor what the photons actually reported.

And because pictures alone weren't enough: I went back to school. I am currently a freshman at Arizona State University, studying astronomy and physics — yes, a cardiologist with two doctorates sitting in first-year physics, and delighted about it. The degree is the long road to the science beneath the images: photometry, spectroscopy, variable stars.

The rest of the ledger: University of Michigan alumnus (MBA), Louisville native (Go Cards — and Flaget Braves!), CERT volunteer, bourbon enthusiast, cyclist, and grandfather — the walls of my grandchildren's rooms are this observatory's most important gallery.