Lucianne Walkowicz, a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow, studies the inscrutable faces of the stars for clues to the inner workings of their hearts.

in her TEDxPhoenix 11.11.11 TEDxTalk, Lucianne explains the importance of preserving our dark night sky from the perils of light pollution and other lesser-known factors. In Lucianne's eyes, "Our night sky is a natural resource, it's like a park you can visit without ever having to travel there. But like any natural resource, if we don't protect it, if we don't preserve it and treasure it, it will slip away from us and be gone."

Lucianne got her taste for astronomy as an undergrad at Johns Hopkins, testing detectors for the Hubble Space Telescope's new camera (installed in 2002). She also learned to love the dark stellar denizens of our galaxy, the red dwarfs, which became the topic of her PhD dissertation at University of Washington. Lucianne is currently a leader in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a new project that will scan the sky every night for 10 years to create a huge cosmic movie of our Universe.