by Troy Lambert
Dr. John Wayne Wooten, chief astronomy professor at Pensacola Junior College, has had an extraordinary career peering at the heavens and sharing his knowledge with those of us on Earth.
From a young age, Wooten knew what he was going to do with his life.
Back in mid-August 1957, after a long afternoon of combining oats on his family’s 440-acre farm, a young Wooten tossed his last bag of oats onto a large pile as darkness fell. The 9-year-old plopped down on that bag of oats and looked into the western sky. Wooten saw what he describes as “the beautiful comet Mrkos,” and an astronomer was born.
“It was one of those critical, life-changing things,” he said.
He went on to receive a doctorate at the University of Florida in 1979, and also studied at the Florida Institute of Technology.
In 1974, Wooten came to Pensacola Junior College as director of the Audio Visual Labs; at that time he was teaching physics, chemistry, geology and astronomy in a multi-disciplinary lab approach.
Since 1979, Wooten, 60, he has been teaching astronomy full time at PJC as chief astronomy professor, designing the labs, audio visual instruction, tele-courses and Web classes.
“I was the original distance-learning guy here at PJC. Practically every venue of distance learning, we developed. I was the first one to have a course online. I’ve been leading that whole crusade for 20 years now and, of course, that’s how I got connected with the Emmy,” Wooten said.
That’s right. He said Emmy.
Wooten’s work with Public Broadcasting Service station KOCE-TV (the sixth-most watched PBS station in America) and their production of “Astronomy: Observations & Theories” won an Emmy for Instructional Programming in 2006.
The Emmy-winning series is one of the tools that Wooten utilizes in his classroom lectures.
In 1986, he became the first professor at Pensacola Junior College to receive the school’s Teacher of the Year Award, and in April 1991 he became the only professor to have received that honor at both the University of West Florida and PJC.
Edwin Stout, department head of physical sciences at Pensacola Junior College, said Wooten brings these strengths to the department of physical science: “knowledge, enthusiasm, excitement, scope and depth.”
Stout tells students, “I don’t care what your major is; if you don’t take a course from Dr. Wooten while you’re here at PJC you’re missing out on something.”
Stout is right, according to Joshua Encinias, a 21-year-old journalism major who takes Wooten’s three-hour night course and lab.
“He’s fully involved in his work. He’s very giving when it comes to his field of expertise. He doesn’t hold it all in; he gives it to the world. I think that’s very honorable,” Encinias said.
Wooten can also lay claim to a first in astronomy.
In March 1979, he was at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories as a guest scientist where, with the help of the Voyager I space probe, he snapped the first known picture of Jupiter’s equatorial ring.
Said Wooten: “At about 11 o’clock everybody else went to lunch and I was there watching the navigation frames and twiddling my thumbs and saw the image come up and said, ‘Hey! I know what those streaks are. That’s Aldebaran and that’s the star field of Taurus, but who in the Sam Hill is that?’ That’s when we said, ‘OK guys, what’s going on here? OK, well it’s around the equator — we’ve got a ring here.'”
Four months later, Voyager II confirmed the discovery when it snapped a beautiful picture of Jupiter’s ring.
“Of course Voyager II cheated because it knew what to look for. Hindsight is always better than foresight, especially if you’re looking for dusty rings from the back side of a planet,” laughed Wooten.