22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 11-17, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com It cannot be done remotely, requiring astronomers to stay awake overnight. It is lonely work. (When it’s his turn to observe, Cotton relies on Coca-Cola to stay awake, and tries to sleep during the day.) The whole purpose for the observatory’s existence is the telescope—built around a 36-inch mirror so smooth it is invisible at first glance—and the building exists just to protect the telescope from the elements. The roof is on wheels, and slides back to expose the scope to the sky. An astronomer on shift might spend a lot of time just across the deck in a modest control room, flanked by about 10 computers, including an ancient one that reads floppy disks, still relevant to one particular software. There are weather and air pollution updates, data on dust particles and utilitarian information like the solar array output. (Besides the computers, there are some amenities—a cot for resting, a few board games on a bookshelf. It’s sparse, but cozy.) But the computers do only so much. The astronomer must not only stay awake but stay attentive to conditions. “You have to be very careful you don’t get dew forming,” Cotton says. “The last thing you want is for your telescope to be rained on.” At the first signs of dew—a slippery floor, for example—he rolls the roof shut. The perfectly flat, reflective mirror does the heavy lifting of the telescope, but it’s the instruments that astronomers attach to it that makes it resemble what most laypeople might describe as a “telescope.” What we see otherwise is a giant tube with various wires dangling. Inside, the light is directed to instruments with specific tasks. One possible attachment is an eyepiece so you can look through it at the sky—the easily identifiable part. Some astronomers attach spectrographs to measure the color of light. Some use a photometer to measure the position and brightness of stars. For his research on polarization, Cotton attached a polarimeter, one that he helped invent. “It’s the most precise stellar polarimeter anywhere in the world,” he says matter-of-factly. It looks like a cube with a patchwork of wires and panels, and works similarly to polarized sunglasses, he says, racing against the atmosphere to grab multiple images of bright stars. “It is helping to understand the evolution of those stars and therefore, the evolution of the galaxy.” He discovered that stars are indeed polarized—that two stars orbiting around each other are reflecting each other’s light. The previous prevailing belief was that stars absorb light from nearby stars and then readmit it; this instrument affixed to this telescope showed that actually, they reflect light. The readings Cotton gets appear as numerical voltage readouts—numbers, not beautiful images of the expansive night sky. But like most astronomers, it was partly the awe of the night sky that drew Cotton to the field—but it was the telescope that drew him to MIRA. When it was founded in 1972, MIRA became the first private astronomy institute established in the 20th century in the United States, in an era when universities had come to dominate the field. The independence is both a competitive disadvantage—Cotton says grants are often awarded for flashy projects—but also an advantage. “We can do work that is unfashionable at universities, with larger telescopes that are usually looking at exoplanets and galaxies,” he says. “If you’re looking at stars, that is less fashionable.” Less fashionable in this case means getting back to basics—but there are still plenty of unanswered questions in the realm of “basics” in astronomy. While some bigger labs might be pursuing more ambitious projects, like looking for verification of alien life, MIRA astronomers are exploring stars. “You can set up, listening, waiting for the money shot,” Cotton says. “Or you go back to the fundamentals and understand how stars work.” In Cotton’s case, that is polarization. He grew up in a dark area in Australia, where he could see the Southern Cross from his bedroom. He was a physics major first, and an astronomer second. He planned to stay close to home. But when he started looking for jobs on online astronomy job boards, he found a home at one of the furthest-away possible points on the planet: Monterey County. “The reason I am here at MIRA is because we have small and medium telescopes,” Cotton says. “I need lots of telescope time to help develop instruments.” MIRA astronomers set out in the past two years to revisit questions about the atmosphere of Venus, which had been measured in the 1920s and 1960s and not since then. “By taking measurements last year and the year before, we’ve created a 100-year time baseline,” Cotton says. “And it’s definitely changed.” The atmosphere of Venus polarizes light and features what is known as an unknown UV absorber—unknown because astronomers don’t know exactly what it is, just that it affects their readings; the amount of UV light is less than what it should be, and something is absorbing it. And in this case, it might reveal relevant information about a runaway greenhouse effect, characteristic of Venus’ atmosphere. Even the essential, not-flashy parts of astronomy are helping enable humans to answer big questions. Astronomer Jean Perkins (above) leads community stargazing events in addition to doing research. At left and below, participants of all ages join in a star party hosted by MIRA at Garland Ranch Regional Park in June. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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