Craig Chester (astronomer)
[1] The nine students founded MIRA in 1972 as a nonprofit institution,[10] paying the down payment on 80 acres in the Los Padres National Forest out of their savings.
[8] As they graduated, the group began a mail-order discount bookstore to make money for the MIRA observatory they planned to build, and each of the nine members contributed a part of their earnings from work, which included part-time teaching, computer programming and other jobs.
[8] Astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild of Princeton University gave MIRA a loan for an indefinite period of a 36-inch telescope mirror that had been intended as a backup for a NASA project but which had never been used; the University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences donated the exacting labor to cut the needed hole in the already-polished mirror, and the Research Corporation gave the MIRA group a $76,000 grant to build the telescope, among many other donations.
[1] In 1980,[12] Bernard M. Oliver of the Hewlett Packard company created a $200,000 one-for-one one-year matching grant to help build the MIRA observatory.
[13] While Chester worked to rewrite the coordinate program for the telescope, research and a community lecture series began, and both Oliver and Bidelman became part of MIRA's early advisory board along with photographer Ansel Adams, physicist Luis Walter Alvarez, astronomer Bart Bok, politician George E. Brown and astronomer Carl Sagan.
[14] Chester was president of MIRA in 1993 as they continued to improve facilities and do research while providing a community service class, a summer high school science teacher program, and a public lecture series.
[4][21] Craig Chester suggested the Star of Bethlehem "stopping" referred to in the biblical narrative[22] could have been what astronomers call a "stationary point".
[29] At SAIC, which is a government services contractor,[30] Chester supervised a team that managed data from US Navy and Air Force weather satellites at the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center.
[31] Lynne Chester was a foundation administrator, photographer, and artist who died in 2012 of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's Disease) after 27 years of marriage.
