Donald Goldsmith received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969, and was a postdoctoral fellow (at Stanford and Berkeley) and then a faculty member (at the State University of New York, Stony Brook) before devoting himself to the full-time popularization of astronomy. Dr. Goldsmith served as a full-time consultant at KCET-Television for the 13-hour television series “Cosmos,” hosted by Carl Sagan, who was his undergraduate advisor at Harvard. He was the science editor and co-writer of the 1986 NOVA special “Is Anybody Out There?” featuring Lily Tomlin, and served in the same capacity for the 6-hour public television series “The Astronomers,” first broadcast in 1991, for which Dr. Goldsmith also wrote the companion book. His book Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, written in collaboration with Neil Tyson, was the companion volume to the 2004 public television series “ORIGINS.”

He has written, co-authored, or edited more than two-dozen books on astronomy, and has produced numerous articles for journals such as Natural History, Discover, and Astronomy. Among Dr, Goldsmith's books are The Runaway Universe, Connecting with the Cosmos, Worlds Unnumbered, and Einstein's Greatest Blunder?

Kris Koenig is a 2005 Emmy® Award-winning writer for the 10-hour public television telecourse “Astronomy: Observations & Theories”. He is a lecturer at California State University of Chico, and the founder and director of the Kiwanis Chico Community Observatory and the Shoemaker Open Sky Planetarium. He is also an associate member of the American Astronomical Society.

Albert van Helden is emeritus professor at Rice University and the University of Utrecht. He was trained as an engineer and worked at the Ford Motor Company for several years, before changing to history. He earned his Ph.D. at Imperial College, University of London, in 1970, and taught at Rice from 1970 to 2001 and Utrecht from 2001 to 2005. His research specialty is the history of astronomy, and his publications include The Invention of the Telescope (1977), Measuring the Universe (1983), The History of Science in the Netherlands (1999, with L.C. Palm and K. van Berkel), and a number of papers on the astronomy of Christiaan Huygens. His book Galileo and Scheiner on Sunspots, 1611-1613, coauthored with Eileen Reeves, will be published in 2008. Van Helden served as President of the History of Science Society, from 1998 to 1999. He is the originator of the Galileo Project, an Internet resource on the life and works of Galileo.