Jeffrey S. Medkeff (1968 – 3 August 2008), usually known as Jeff Medkeff, was a prominent science writer and educator. He was also a designer of robotic telescopes, a minor philanthropist, and an advocate of personal and sexual freedom. Early life Medkeff was born in Akron, Ohio in 1968, and was raised in nearby Cuyahoga Falls. He contracted asthma early in life, and endured several prolonged hospitalizations as a child. The condition was severe enough to restrict his activity and pose a threat to his life. He attributed a lifelong love of reading and self-directed learning to this experience. He was a skeptic and an atheist. Career as a systems professional Medkeff was educated at Ohio State University. He was a principal in a technology start-up in the early 1990s, which was sold at great profit. He later took a position as a systems analyst at Ohio State, where he worked while his wife completed veterinary school. In 1994, Jeff moved to Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he began working at Junk Bond Observatory in an asteroid hunting program. Quickly tiring of the tedious work, he began development of an automated observing and reduction system for this work. In 1997, he adopted an early form of the Astronomy Common Object Model standard as his primary means of communicating with devices such as telescopes and cameras. He credited the ability to use pre-existing drivers and utility objects as freeing him to concentrate on design and workflow issues for the observatory. The results were reported in a series of papers to the Minor Planet Amateur-Professional Workshops and in journals. By 1999, the observatory's acquisition of asteroid images was fully automated, and a considerable amount of the reduction was automatic as well. Medkeff founded Rockland Observatory around this time, and was later appointed director of the privately held Small Telescope Astronomical Research Observatory; further development was done at both facilities. By the end of 2000, the process of selecting targets for a night's observing was under computer control, while still allowing astronomer-specified targets to be defined, and allowing targets of opportunity to interrupt the night's scheduled observing. By this time, a number of observatories in Arizona, Australia and Europe were utilizing Medkeff's system in whole or part. From 2000 to 2004, he refined the software, and also adapted it for use in supernova surveys, cataclysmic variable star photometry, and trans-Neptunian object surveys. By 2004,