Jeff Kanipe

Jeff Kanipe (born September 8, 1953, in Corpus Christi, Texas) is a science writer and author of astronomy books.

Jeff received a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. He's been a science writer and editor for over 25 years, working as an editor for several space magazines including StarDate and Astronomy. For a period in the early 2000s he served as skywatching columnist at SPACE.com and host of the popular Ask the Astronomer forum. Occasionally he writes articles for such sites as well as scholarly magazines like Nature, but his real passion is writing astronomy books.

Asteroid 84447 Jeffkanipe is named in his honor, for his discovery of the earliest known prediscovery image of the asteroid, previously known as 2002 TU240.

• Annals of the Deep Sky: A Survey of Galactic and Extragalactic Objects (2015/16, Willmann-Bell, with Dennis Webb)
• Island on Fire: The Extraordinary Story of A Forgotten Volcano That Changed the World (2015, Pegasus Books, with Alexandra Witze)
• The Cosmic Connection: How Astronomical Events Impact Life on Earth (2009, Prometheus Books)
• The Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies: A Chronicle and Observer's Guide (2007, Willmann-Bell)
• Chasing Hubble's Shadows: The Search for Galaxies at the Edge of Time (2006, Farrar Straus Giroux)
• Astronomy: The Definitive Guide (2003, Barnes & Noble Books)
• Star and Sky (2000, Discovery Insight Guides)
• A Skywatcher's Year (1999, Cambridge University Press)
• Advanced Skywatching (1997, Weldon Owen)

"I've been waiting since the 1980s. Now it's happening. We're getting an expanded, updated successor to the legendary Burnham's Celestial Handbook." — Alan MacRobert, Sky & Telescope, December 2015.

"We're doomed! ...or not. In The Cosmic Connection, Jeff Kanipe tackles the Earth's place in the universe, and how other denizens and aspects of the cosmos have contributed to the development of life here. Yet, they may also have led to mass extinctions in the past and may yet again in the future. The cosmos giveth and the cosmos taketh away, it seems."

Jeff is married to Alexandra Witze, a correspondent for Nature magazine. They live in Boulder, Colorado. Jeff has two daughters: Hayley Bond and Carly Kanipe. His brother, David Kanipe, teaches aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station.