20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 11-17, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com SERIOUS SCIENCE IS HAPPENING AT THE MONTEREY INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN ASTRONOMY. By Sara Rubin OUT OF THIS WORLD It requires a certain amount of audacity to be an astronomer at all, craning one’s gaze toward the sky, hoping to discover something in the vastness of our galaxy, or beyond. It takes even more audacity to start an astronomy institute. But that is exactly what Bruce Weaver and a group of fellow PhD students at Case Western Reserve University set out to do, starting with a dream circa 1970. Looking for a place that was sufficiently dark for their astronomical research, Weaver and company were drawn to the Santa Lucia Mountains. In 1972, they founded the nonprofit Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy. (The acronym, MIRA, refers to the star Mira—aka omicron ceti—in the Cetus constellation, which resembles a whale.) But the paperwork to register the organization was just one simple administrative step. “If you’re going to run your own astronomy institute, you need a telescope. If you’re going to build a telescope, you need a mirror,” explains Daniel Cotton, now an astronomer at MIRA who was not even born at the Light from the sun is broken out into its separate colors and stacked up across a camera detector in a spectrograph. The dark vertical lines are due to absorption from various chemical elements in the atmosphere. Astronomer Daniel Cotton helped invent this polarimeter, an instrument that attaches to the telescope. Readings help him advance his research on polarization. COURTESY MIRA SARA RUBIN
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==