Celebrate the life of Tim Conrow

It was my pleasure to have known him and worked with him on WISE and NEOWISE.  He was always the go-to person for any of the big problems we ran into with the WISE data, and he will be missed.

My thoughts are with you and your family. As we say in Judaism, may his memory always be a blessing. I know I will cherish my memories of him.

.... (W)hen he visited me in Washington, DC in June, 2004 for the Transit of Venus, (h)e had brought a neat pair of image stabilizing binoculars and solar filters that we rigged up with cardboard. Then we were out at dawn to watch the transit.

I worked with Tim for many years on GALEX.  I am so sad to hear about his passing.  Tim was simply a stellar human being, and I was blessed to have known him.  

Tim had a heart of gold. With this small gift [Nature Conservancy, nature.org], I honor his love of nature and his wish to protect those wonderful fragile creatures in his lovely photographs 

Tim has been a part of IPAC for almost  as  long as I can remember. His hard work, knowledge, skills and  cheerfulness are embedded in each of the hundreds of millions of objects discovered by IRAS, 2MASS and WISE and in the millions  of images he helped to create.

We will miss him greatly.

Tim had been to my home in Monrovia several times to play board games with my family, friends and co-workers. Our dog Gabby was always happy to see Tim as he petted her more than anyone else in the family.  She would often bark when he was leaving.     

We are so sad to hear about Tim. He was such a wonderful person and fun friend.    

We are so sorry to hear of his passing and so grateful we had the chance to meet him at Service Awards. I wanted to pass along the photos of him with the President to you, so that his friends and family could share in remembering this celebratory moment. We were grateful for the opportunity to appreciate his contributions to the Institute and are thinking of you and your colleagues as you commemorate his life and mourn his passing.

I have not seen Tim for more years than I care to think about; we were friends from his says of singing in the Lightshine Choir at St. Luke's in Temple City. I became Facebook friends with him several years ago, but that never led to actually meeting up with him, though he lived close to where I teach. The greatest memory I have of him is going to see the original "Star Wars" with him back in 1977, and the awe both of us felt at George Lucas' imagination and vision. To think he had a career at JPL and Caltech that followed that experience - wow.
  I am so sorry to hear of his passing. I'm glad I have that memory. May the Force be with him.

George Getze and I were in the same circle of friends with Tim in high school. I remember lunches with a group with Tim and others. Later,  Diane (Wiker) Craig shared an apartment with me. We had a Halloween party in 1984 and Tim kept changing costumes. He was a Blues Brother, then a Samari and finally a Killer Bee. He was always a lot of fun to be around.. George and I saw Tim at a High School Reunion a few years ago. He led a very adventurous life.

Having known Tim for many years it was very saddening to hear of his passing. He was a very likable person and I found his humor to be something unique. I first met Tim when IRAS processing was at JPL around 1982. He was briefly assigned to my group before we reorganized the section and subsequently transferred the processing to Caltech when IPAC was formed. 

I met Tim 21 years ago at a technical interchange meeting (aka TIM) at NASA Goddard when we started working on the WIRE mission. We worked closely for the next 3 years and shared with each other the disappointment in the outcome of the mission, but he kept telling me that we would get a second chance. And that is just what happened with WISE, a resounding success. The last couple of times I was in the Pasadena area, I made it a point to sneak into IPAC, headed straight for Tim’s office and even ended up having dinner together. He will be greatly missed.

Only Tim thought to construct an elegant dance based on molecular orbitals.  He felt fortunate to inhabit a world where many idea streams are able to come together. His first application of a web camera was to peer into the secret life of the dog at home. I don't know if he realized it revealed they shared the qualities of far greater depth than most will ever see, plus subtle quiet playfulness and amusement that only occasionally ripple the surface.  We schemed over several lunches just how to game our homes for pets.  He had many good insights into the world as seen by animals. Tim respected the inner intellect of crows.  Using rocks to raise drinking water is just what they show the public to make us go away. They are scheming world domination and we could only waste their time.  Tim's next subject of remote camera monitoring ?  Ethics of home deliveries. Honorable people and those cutting corners looked the same on camera one, but the second view -- farther in from the street, seeing what no person was thought to see (and using a less obvious camera) -- separated those who could probably be trusted, from those who definitely shouldn't even be trusted with packages.  Tim had a measured sense I appreciated for the retaliatory karma which ought to catch up with those who have it coming -- for their ill deeds -- while knowing how rarely it actually does.  

We built software tools which occasionally interacted; Tim was a concise and quality-conscious craftsman of code, in a world where those dimensions seem ever-less available.  When he got a FLIR camera for his phone, we discussed how to prevent the next arrival from reading a keypad -- using the heat left by touching buttons -- without being so obvious that the person realized they were being fooled; we settled on gently warming numbers in pseudo-random order, making it easy to know when a possible intruder had watched in the infrared rather than knowing the code or just pushing buttons at random.  Figuring out how to make a clear separation of good from bad made for many small successes.  

Tim chewed on curious thoughts until incorporating all angles; he was almost always ready with an insightful opinion on just about any subject.  I will miss his fine articulate delineation of ideas and his sense of humor -- usually concise and timely, often wry, and sometimes crisp in the face of stupidity.  

Tim sat at Lagrange points among the orbits of many common friends.  We met in 1989; I was in grad school; he was down the street at IPAC during the day, but kept turning up evenings and weekends in interesting places, and through people I knew only in different solar systems.  We overlapped most for hikes, games, occasional country dance, and when I was invited to join their dinner group. Sharing time at IPAC was an unexpected bonus.  I was especially fortunate for the past few years to have had an office only steps from Tim.  Laura and I got to see the brief almost-covert reverse parade, following the Rose Bowl floats away from display in the middle of the night, thanks to Tim's insider location, generosity keeping watch, and texting at 2 AM on the right day.  Claude brought us together again with board games and science fiction.  We knew and lost Kathleen Spellman over the period we've known each other. We both came to appreciate a special sanity and cleverness in Claire Slutter's sense of humor.  I am very thankful to you, Cynthia, for making it possible to say goodbye while Tim could still sit up and face the world with dignity, despite the scale of medical siege he shouldered with enormous understatement.  With the loss of Arthur Vaughan, and learning how many of us got to see different facets across years over lunch, I am particularly grateful for the shared memories of others here, which broaden my knowledge of Tim, who remains with all of us from generously sharing his mind and thoughts.  I will miss him in more ways than we might polysyllabically enumerate over lunch if we were trying to box in nebulous ideas with sharp hospital corners.