Rick Fienberg (Astronomy in the 21st Century) is Editor in Chief of Sky & Telescope magazine and serves as editorial director of Sky Publishing. He has a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard and did his thesis research in Arizona and Hawaii where he captured infrared images of planetary nebulae, active galaxies, and the center of the Milky Way.

Although trained as a professional astronomer, Rick remains an amateur at heart. From his home just outside Boston he uses a Tele Vue-85 refractor to observe the sun, moon, planets, and star clusters. On weekends he drives 100 miles north to the dark skies of southern New Hampshire, where he observes galaxies and nebulae using a Meade 12-inch LX200 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope mounted permanently in a roll-off-roof observatory that he built himself.

Rick will engage in a bit of crystal-ball-gazing for both amateur and professional astronomy, and predict where we will be at the end of the 21st century. These predictions, he surmises, will be about as accurate as the predictions made back in 1902 for where we'd be by the end of the 20th century.