Do-lt-Yourself Observatory

Vegetables becoming too expensive? Plant a garden. Mortgage loans unavailable? Put together your own log cabin in the woods. No job openings despite your Ph.D. in astronomy? Get together with other unemployed astronomers and build yourselves an observatory. Implausible as that last exercise in self-reliance may sound, just such a project is in the works a mile high in California's coastal mountains. There, a band of six young astronomers, all graduates of Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University, are building what they avidly hope will become a major independent observatory.

The group was driven to its decision by some hard numbers. During the decline of the space program in the late 1960s, funds for expanding astronomical research began to dry up. That left some 800 graduate students working on doctorates in astronomy with little hope of future employment; there are fewer than 50 astronomy job-openings per year in the U.S. "The handwriting was on the wall, and there was considerable gloom and doom among young astronomers," recalls Craig Chester, 32. "We decided that it's better to hang together than hang separately."

Lucky Stars. In 1971 Chester and his five Case Western Reserve colleagues began feasibility studies on their plan--including a hard look at the group's prospects for hanging together for five whole years. They decided that their do-it-yourself project was indeed practical. After carefully selecting a site that was suitably high, dry and far from city lights in the Los Padres National Forest near Monterey, they dubbed their brainchild MIRA--the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy.

MIRA was apparently born under some lucky stars. Ordinarily, it would have cost some $150,000 for the telescope alone. Before long, Bruce Weaver, 28, was able to talk Princeton University into providing--on "indefinite loan"--a 36-in. mirror for the reflecting telescope. An astronomer at Lick Observatory near San Jose volunteered to design the instrument free of charge, and a Los Angeles metal fabricator has agreed to build it at cost--about $20,000. In all, well-wishers have donated more than $100,000 in free equipment, including two computers, one of which will control the telescope. The biggest gift came two weeks ago: a $76,000 grant from New York's Research Corporation. "I could teach a graduate level course in scrounging," says Albert Merville, 34, who combed the West Coast seeking benefactors. The six still have a long way to go in raising funds for the observatory's buildings. "Right now it's still the you-name-it observatory," says Merville. "The name goes on when the big donation comes in."

To help make personal ends meet, the six astronomers have begun a discount book-jobbing business, which last year grossed $40,000. Ultimately, one of the observatory computers will mastermind the book operation, helping to bring in revenues while MIRA concentrates on its first major goal: the compilation of a data bank on the 125,000 brightest stars visible from the Northern Hemisphere. Now that they are involved with MIRA, the six young astronomers find the prospect of conventional employment in their field much less alluring than before. "I'd stay right here with this now, even if a terrific research job came along," says Hazel Ross, 28. "We're running a business, planning road surveys, designing septic tanks --it's just so much more fun than worrying about publish or perish."

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