Michael W. Thacher

Michael Thacher and his wife, Rhonda Rundle, are long-time space enthusiasts. Michael’s fascination with the cosmos was sparked at the age of eight, when his mother woke him from a deep sleep to see Venus, the morning star, shining brightly in the sky above his family’s home. He was astounded that something so extraordinarily bright and beautiful could appear during the night when it wasn’t there at bedtime.

Michael and Rhonda have toured astronomical observatories around the world, including, Chile, England and the United States. (They are pictured at the Parkes radio telescope in Australia.) They have also experienced total eclipses of the sun in 2017 (Oregon) and 2024 (Texas).

Michael and Rhonda are both graduates of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. For more than 20 years, Michael worked as a public affairs executive for major energy companies in California, overseeing media relations, employee communications and executive presentations, as well as some financial and business marketing communications. From 1984 to 1985, he was Manager of Corporate Communications at Northrop Corp.

As a professional writer specializing in astronomy, he contributed articles, news stories and book reviews to a wide variety of daily papers and periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and Astronomy magazine.

Currently, Michael serves on the Board of Advisors of both UCLA’s Division of Physical Sciences and its Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. He is a member (emeritus) of the National Council for Arts and Sciences at The George Washington University, where he sponsors student fellowships in philosophy, the physical sciences and engineering, as well as an outstanding publication award in the Space Policy Institute. He also supports an annual postdoctoral research award in astronomy for the Carnegie Observatories. At UCLA, he and Rhonda have created a collection endowment for astronomy and the planetary sciences within the university library. Since 2004, Michael has conducted public tours and educational outreach at Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California.