So Far, so Good — My First 82 Years

Abstract

My romantic attraction to the stars started at the age of 11 under the dark Swedish skies. While it was clear from then on that I wanted to be an astronomer, a sequence of chance encounters led me to choose solar physics and embark on an unpredictable path across the globe, including work for my PhD in the USSR about the Sun’s magnetic field, followed by an experiment on a Soviet satellite to record scattering polarization on the Sun. On my first hike in the Rocky Mountains in 1971, I had a chance encounter with my future wife and married 4 months later in Sweden. In 1980, we moved to Switzerland for 43 years. Finally, our geographically scattered family reunited. All of us, sons and grandsons, are now settled in Colorado. My story tells how this unplanned path was intertwined with the search for answers about the nature of solar magnetism.