Shooting for the stars

Valley Life editor

The sky is not the limit. Just ask Palmer's Teressa Van Diest.

Van Diest, a 17-year-old senior-to-be, joined 35 top science students from around the country for a six-week grueling science camp this summer, where she mapped asteroids and wrote computer programs to track and calculate orbital movements.

While some students would shudder at the thought of spending summer vacation in a California observatory until the wee hours of the morning, and then using physics and mathematics to write computer programs, Van Diest was more than happy for the opportunity.

"It was very challenging, but the feeling that you were in a scientific community where everyone was collaborating on a big project was incredible," Van Diest, a homeschool student with the IDEA program, said. "I'm very interested in science, especially astronomy and physics.

"I like studying things that we are right on the verge of discovering," Van Diest said. "Like dark matter and dark energy. We know they are supposed to exist, but we can't find them yet. That kind of stuff really interests me."

Van Diest first applied to the Summer Science Program after an Internet search for summer science camps.

"It looked pretty cool," she said.

Normally, a six-week science camp as intense as the SSP costs quite a bit. But Van Diest received a scholarship to attend. Before she left, she spent some time hitting the books.

"I did a lot of reviewing before I went. I wanted to be prepared," she said.

While many students will write their "What I did on my summer vacation" story about days spent playing video games, Van Diest can write hers about spending six hours in college-level lectures, and many more hours in the Mount Wilson observatory.

"We'd wake up and have breakfast, and then have a three-hour lecture. After lunch, we'd have another three-hour lecture, and then have free time, but there was a lot of stuff to work on during that time," Van Diest said, describing a day at the camp. "From 10 o'clock to about three in the morning, a lot of us would go to the observatory and expose film on the asteroid we were tracking."

After that, Van Diest and the other students would head to the darkroom to process those images. And that was only the beginning.

"We had to measure distance between the stars and asteroids, and use those distances to get exact positioning of your asteroid," Van Diest explained. "At the end, we had to write a computer program to figure out orbital elements. I didn't know a lot of computer programming, so that was a challenge."

As part of the program, Van Diest and the other students learned from some of the leading scientists in the country in their respective fields, including James Randi, a well-known investigator of pseudoscience, and Dr. Jay Pasachoff of Williams College, a leading astronomer and author. Students were also able to get a behind-the-scenes visit at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The summer camp left a positive impression on Van Diest. She said she doesn't know exactly where she's going to college, but her six weeks spent in California were a hit, and she'd like to go to school there. She plans to major in physics with a minor in botany and Spanish.

"I like science because it is so logical and you learn about how things work," Van Diest said.