Livewire gives astronomy a jolt

Jennie McCormick stands in front of her backyard observatory. Picture / Greg Bowker

There is absolutely no reason why the woman who helped discover a planet should not be wearing a mini dress and knee high black boots and be blonde and resemble a younger, prettier Camilla Parker Bowles. Jennie McCormick has great legs, so why not show them off?

I hadn't really thought about what she might look like. What difference does it make anyway? But it turns out that she has spent rather a lot of time thinking about how she might be perceived by other astronomers. She is not giving it much of a thought now. Discovering a planet is more than enough proof that "this blondie woman amateur can do the work".

I'm quite taken aback by this because she certainly doesn't come across as lacking in confidence but, "I used to have this perception that all these guys would think 'oh, yeah, silly blondie'. I mean look! Look at me today! I mean, my God, who would think a young girl of 15, leaving school, going to ride blinking horses, no education ... Look what I've done! I've discovered, helped discover, a planet."

If I'd thought at all about what an amateur astronomer with an observatory in her back yard might be like, I suppose I might have conjured a quietly thoughtful type, much given to solitary contemplation. Actually, perhaps it is this solitary contemplation that means that McCormick is a loudly thoughtful type who, over two generously given hours at the end of her working day, and with a terrible cold, talks non-stop. Talking to her is like trying to keep pace with a shooting star.

The work she does is rigorous, detailed and done in the hours of the morning when the world, at least in this hemisphere, is silent and sleeping.

It is quite hard to imagine her during these hours. So I asked what she did over the three nights, from midnight until 4am when she was watching for the deviation in the light of a distant star which would indicate the discovery of the new planet. I feared there might be a baffling scientific description. "It was really an adrenaline rush stuff. What did I do? Oh, I had a wine, I was talking to Grant Christie [at Stardome Observatory, her New Zealand co-discoverer], folding washing, checking email, doing my website."

Contemplative? Not when McCormick is the astronomer on watch.

What she saw was this: "The brightness of the star slowly reduced and I thought: 'that's not normal and I thought, 'now do I risk it? Do I actually tell them it's dropped? And I did and I'm glad I did." Them is the astronomers at Ohio State University. Then she started reading "these emails which said 'Jennie from Farm Cove in New Zealand has said it's dropped." And here came the scientific part of the description: "I'm thinking 'shit. Shit. Oh shit!" Because she was nervous that if she'd got it wrong, well, people would go on thinking "that we couldn't actually do this with such a little telescope. I don't think they thought amateurs could do it."

She has known about the planet since April 22 "but we had to be quiet. It was embargoed, which was very hard."

She tells me this five minutes after we have walked in the door of her Pakuranga house where she is again folding washing which she immediately dumps to take us on a guided tour of her observatory. Guided tour is overstating it, rather. It is about the size of a Wendy House and has a rusting roof, wires held out of the way with clothes pegs and a weight fashioned from a Tupperware container filled with fishing lures. The computer which talks to the telescope - a ten inch tiddler - cost $180 and she bought it from Trade Me. She says "excuse the rust", but is really proud as could be of the place. "This is one way, me, the amateur, can make a contribution and because I haven't got a PhD or a Masters, the only thing I could do was build an observatory."

I think she could fly to the moon if she put her mind to it but I don't believe for a minute that she had been able to keep mum on the embargoed planet for more than, say, five minutes. And she hadn't. "Of course I told my mother. And my children. Who went 'yeah, yeah'."

It was "because of my mother, I suppose" that she first became interested in the night sky. "I remember being with my mum as a little kid and saying 'what are those stars up there?' and she said, "The Pot.' Which is so wrong. They're called Orion the Hunter." You can see that she might have been a bit of an argumentative child. She spent quite a lot of her teenage years lying in volcanic cones. "I can still see myself doing that actually. Lying there with binoculars looking up and thinking: 'What the hell is that?' "

She left school at 15 because she had decided, for some reason which now completely eludes her, to become a jockey. She rode "until I was 18 and broke my jaw. And then I met his dad [she nods at son John ] and got pregnant and didn't get married. Anyway, I finally met Trevor, that's my youngest son's dad and we got married and I was married for, what, seven years? And do you know I look back on that and - and I hate to say this - but astronomy sort of saved my sanity."
She found her life small and confining. Through a telescope she could see other life forms of a sort; a bigger canvas. "I wanted to see stars forming and planets forming and stars dying." The first time she saw Saturn she thought it was so beautiful she wrote a poem about it. She also saw something else: that there was no way the earth could have been made in seven days "and all this bollocks. I'm sure my mind was totally opened up and I realised: I've been conned."

She joined the Auckland Astronomy Society and met like-minded people who liked talking about the stars and telescopes and "sex and people".

She met Fred who became her partner and they built the observatory. He lost interest in astronomy and they eventually broke up three years ago. "It's quite interesting," she says, tracing the data she keeps because "where Fred is no longer involved it drops off. It's like a light curve in itself."

We have got to the science bit - in what I now think must be McCormick's typically roundabout way of getting places - and I have told her she must speak very slowly and explain carefully, just as she does with the children she teaches about the universe at Stardome.

She says "I promise I'll do my best" and so we go into the kitchen where she takes down a framed bit of paper with what looks to me like a print-out from a seismograph. Below this is a bunch of dots, with one larger dot with a square drawn around it. Look, she says, here it is, the star, brightening, "now, if there was no planet there it would have pwoooah over the top! And this is my son John, that's my oldest. John, I've had people, men, asking me to autograph a light curve, that's honest ... So anyway, that's the light curve showing the planet. Here it is. See that square?"

Right, clear as day. That's her planet. "No, that's the star it was orbiting. You can't see the planet because it's too far away."

I ask her whether she thinks she might be an obsessive sort and she says, "No. I have to say, this has to be a lifestyle. I work in the field, I associate with astronomers, I have an observatory in the garden." She has no friends who are not astronomers. That is not obsessive. "No, it's not. I have a tattoo on my back of the stars that was given to me as a present. Although I didn't have to do it. Anyway, I did. So, no. I don't think so."

She'll never see her planet (and that's me calling it "her planet" by the way), the technology's not advanced enough. Shame that. Because we are now sitting outside in the dark, smoking, while she has her picture taken and talking about whether astronomers are a breed and whether there's life out there. She says "you know, when I'm sitting out here contemplating life, thinking: 'where are all the big brained men, ha ha ha, that's what I'm thinking of. They're probably on that planet."

She doesn't know if the planet will ever be named, and she was one of many around the world who helped find it. But, really, I think she deserves to have it named after her: for services to livening up astronomy.