Leon Golub is a Senior Astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and has been studying the Sun and solar-type stars since the Skylab missions in 1973–4 and the Einstein Observatory in 1978. He is the head of the Solar-Stellar X-ray Group at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and has been involved in building and flying cutting-edge space instrumentation for the past thirty years. He is Chair of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society and has written many popular articles on subjects ranging from astronomy and philosophy to music criticism.