When I was at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for my first sabbatical, I had a job working on solar flares, large explosions in the Sun's atmosphere that release about 1/6^th of the Sun's total energy in a matter of seconds. I moonlighted during evenings, nights and weekends researching gamma-ray bursts. A colleague who knew that I was spending my so-called spare time studying these bursts emailed me and asked me to look in my database to help confirm his observation that a series of the bursts came from the same part of the sky. I jumped at the chance!

Every night, after my daytime research, I carried armloads of tapes--as many as I could hold--down to the basement of the building where I worked. I stayed until midnight every night analyzing tapes, looking for these repeating gamma-ray bursts. Some people said I was wasting my time, but I hit the jackpot! I found them, and in the process became part of the discovery team for a brand new phenomenon called a soft gamma repeater. Later it was believed that soft gamma repeaters were actually neutron stars with extraordinarily strong magnetic fields, called magnetars. I confirmed this in observations for which I was recognized with the 2003 Bruno Rossi Prize of the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.