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Jacob is fond of all sports, especially basketball. He also plays the alto saxophone in a jazz band and enjoys camping, river rafting, skiing, and launching model rockets. He'd like to pursue a career in computer science. "I enjoy programming, and from watching my father, it seems to be a really fun job," he says.
Jacob says his mentor is Roxanne Hunker, "my fabulous science teacher for four years, because her enthusiasm for science is contagious."
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Skyglow, caused by excess light from urban centers, obscures the visibility of stars and is an increasing problem for astronomical observations. Jacob lives in the San Diego area, where the climate is dry, the skies are clear, and there is accessibility to remote mountains—ideal conditions for night-sky observations. However, light pollution in that area hampers the visibility at the nearby Palomar and Mt. Laguna observatories. Jacob wanted to test whether it was possible to predict the impact of skyglow based on a site's distance from an urban center.
From sites of 30, 60, 75, and 124 kilometers from the urban center of San Diego County, Jacob took 120 photographs of the zenith on nights of similar weather and moonlight conditions between August 2002 and January 2003. He developed and scanned the images into more than 500 computerized bitmap files. Then he wrote a computer program to convert the bitmap files into pixel arrays with pixel intensity values ranging from 0 to 765. He averaged, graphed, and compared the intensity intervals to mathematically correlate the change in intensity (brightness) as a function of the site's distance from the urban center. Jacob concluded that the observable, visible light from stars remains below 50 percent until nearly 35 kilometers from the urban center and does not improve to 90 percent visibility until more than 70 kilometers away. Thus, there is a serious threat to the astronomical observations at the Mt. Laguna and Palomar observatories.
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