Pomona's one-meter telescope offers students a rare opportunity.

Look up," she says, back in the parking lot behind a cluster of Pomona dorms after a night at Table Mountain. "There are only a few left."

And it's true. It's as if there were a party in the sky tonight and now only the stragglers are left behind. The clock in her little Corolla blinks 11:45. It's a lot warmer down here.

The car is making soft noises, little pings and tings suggesting that it's finally catching its breath after 100 miles of driving. Earlier in the day, as the car climbed the six percent grade that winds up to the Table Mountain Observatory, a NASA site that houses a one-meter telescope that Pomona owns, it groaned much more loudly. It's surprising that the old car has made the journey 10 times in the last two months.

It's even more surprising that Elena Scire '04 accompanies it every time. A senior physics major, Scire decided to base her thesis research on the capabilities of the telescope.

"I essentially chose to use the telescope because I could," Scire admits. "My adviser goes to Chile to use a 1.3-meter telescope, so it's pretty amazing that as an undergraduate I have access to a one-meter."

She is using the infrared camera on the telescope to look at protostars that emit low levels of heat and taking pictures of these emissions to see if they remain constant. This research informs a larger project that is being conducted with the twin Keck Telescopes, the world's biggest optical and infrared telescopes that are owned by NASA and located in Hawaii.

Visiting the facility, located about an hour from Claremont amidst the ski slopes above Wrightwood, requires government authorization and extensive viewing of safety videos. "The videos are pretty funny," says Scire. "One basically tells you not to drink liquid nitrogen. Another warns you about wild squirrels that carry the plague." After the vetting, however, students have a great deal of freedom to use the equipment. As Scire's adviser Professor Bryan Penprase notes, any student is eligible to use the telescope if he or she has an appropriate project, although the equipment's location is often a deterrent. Currently, Scire is the only student conducting thesis research at the observatory, though eight other students are authorized to use the site and astronomy classes take a field trip to the telescope every semester.

The telescope is located on land that was originally designated as an "observatory" in 1926 by the Smithsonian Institution and developed in 1962 by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 1-meter apparatus was built at Pomona College and installed on the mountain between 1982 and 1985. In addition to being an undergraduate resource, the telescope is also utilized by Pomona's faculty astronomers and professionals from NASA. In the last five years, it has been used for precision monitoring of Jupiter's atmosphere, photometric observations of galactic star clusters and research into the variability of quasars.

Scire leaves campus around 4 p.m. and doesn't get back till nearly midnight. She normally listens to classical music on the way up because it calms her in the face of the inevitable eastbound traffic.

On the way down after a long night of rigorous observation, it's a different story: "Alper [Ates], the telescope technician, always puts on Russian military music really loud when we drive down from here," she says. "Alper is from Turkey and served his compulsory time in the Turkish Army. The sound of loud Russian voices keeps him awake."

Because there are two computers that are used to operate the telescope, Scire makes her trips with a rotating cast of other authorized students: "I've slowly worked my way through the list so no one person gets too mad about having to drive 100 miles to do data entry."

While the work is sometimes tedious--hours are spent entering and reentering coordinates--she is still excited about what she is looking at with the help of an infrared camera. And from the observatory, away from intrusive city lights, even the naked eye gets some stunning results. "See all those constellations," she says, her neck craned up and her arms holding a V to the sky. "They'll all be gone by the time we get back to campus."

And she's right.

—Misha Chellam '04 is a senior writing intern at PCM.

Photo by Andrew Nuibe ’04