Ascending high school juniors and seniors looking for science fun have come to Happy Valley to photograph the night sky through the crosshairs of the 7-inch astrograph telescope in the domed observatory at the campus. After a steady 10-minute exposure, students then load the film onto a measuring engine, which looks like a diopter microscope and calculate the travel patterns of an asteroid.

The 30 students, 18 boys and 12 girls, are broken up into 10 groups of three members each to work together as teams. After making calculations on the precise positions of stars and the travel patterns of asteroids, they write a computer program to generate the position of the asteroid in the sky. The information is then sent to the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics in Washington, D.C.
Academic Director Tracy Furutani is teaching calculus and physics was a student of the program when it was at the Thacher School in 1979. He came back 20 years later to teach for the program. This coming academic year, he said he'll be teaching chemistry at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo.

Mark Hammergren of the Adler Observatory in Chicago teaches astronomy for the program.

Rohit Gupta, a Jordanian student at the program, said he enjoys the challenges of the program. A typical day will include two three-hour lectures, meals and then long nights at the observatory and then in the "all nighter" computer lab.

The lectures have included guest speakers like Larry Sverdrup from Trex Enterprises in Poway. Sverdrup serves up a mad scientist lecture for the kids. And Jill Tarter from the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence center explained what her organization was up to.

Rezvan Ungureanu from Romania comes into the measuring lab from the computer lab next door and announces that something has gone wrong. He and his colleagues open a thick book with multiple columns of tiny digits that explains stars relationship to each other. They pour through the columns of numbers and figure out the problem.

Ungureanu seems to be popular with the rest of the group. They smile and laugh when he enters the room and talks. He has his favorite places too.
"I'd have to say it's the long nights in the measuring lab," he said.

© 2001 The Ojai Valley News