Space Weather Living History: Dr. Ernie Hildner

In a 2013 interview, Dr. Ernie Hildner shared his remarkable journey in solar physics, which spanned over three decades. His career included directorships at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and NOAA’s Space Environment Center, which later became the Space Weather Prediction Center. Hildner's early research centered on solar prominences, but his pivotal moment arrived during his tenure as an experiment scientist on the Skylab coronagraph in the 1970s.

The Skylab mission revolutionized space weather research by being the first to directly observe and confirm Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) using a disk to block the sun's direct light, creating an artificial eclipse in space. Skylab's X-ray telescopes also identified "coronal holes" for the first time, regions where the sun's magnetic field lines extend out into space like "part in your hair."

Before Skylab, NOAA's predictions of daily solar flares and storms were rudimentary. However, Skylab's well-funded operations established a global network of observatories that monitored the sun in real-time. This significant improvement in space weather forecasting transformed the field from a specialized research area into a critical operational service.