Teen looks into sky, finds God among stars

When Kristen-Elise Brooks looks at the stars from her Schenectady backyard, she doesn't see them in quite the same way she used to.

"My whole perspective has changed. It makes you feel so small. I think you feel God's presence more," she said. "We're such a small part of the universe."

She got that perspective after spending six weeks in the Summer Science Program in Ojai, California, which "exposes academically gifted high school students to advanced topics in mathematics, physics, astronomy and computer science," according to the program's website.

Stardust

To explain what she did alongside 32 other students from 14 states and five countries, Kristen-Elise, a senior at Schenectady High School, reaches into an organized, overstuffed binder.

From meticulous calculations in pencil, including handmade graphs, straight-lined charts and the esoteric signage of calculus, she retrieves a clear piece of plastic the size of a cocktail napkin. It is scattered with hundreds of tiny black blurs and circles reminiscent of flecks of dust.

But they're not dust, she explained; they're stars and asteroids, seen via a powerful telescope that she spent six weeks peering through.

Research

Kristen-Elise and two teammates tracked, charted and calculated the orbit of the asteroid Kleopatra 216 -- research that is now archived at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"It was a great chance to be able to do your own research and have it matter," she said.

The trio located the asteroid's relative position in the sky through mathematical interpolation and took a plate -- a negative image of the stars, on heavy plastic -- of the area.

Subsequently, the team developed the plates and "sat with a magnifying glass, trying to figure out where the stars aligned" with established charts, a painstaking, often hours-long process.

Calculating

When that was done, "we began the process of measuring [the asteroid's precise position]," Kristen-Elise said. Measurements needed to be taken eight times so that the standard deviation could be calculated. If the result was off, they had to start over.

The numbers were then fed into a computer program Kristen-Elise and her team wrote themselves -- outputting the correct orbital data for the asteroid.

"I'm a lot more patient since the program," she laughed.

It figures

When Kristen-Elise wasn't looking through lenses and pounding out her own computer code, she was taking six hours of college-level calculus and astronomy.

"The calculus was amazing," she raved, and she particularly loved the approach her teachers took to the difficult subject. They refrained from too much pure theory in favor of real-life scenarios involving physics and forensics.

"The relationships that calculus allows you to see just make sense," she explained. "You see so much better with calculus than you do with regular math."

Up there, in here

The summer program taught Kristen-Elise -- who attends the Life Teen Mass at St. Ambrose Church in Latham -- about the sky, but she also learned a lot about herself: how she views life, how she studies and how she functions within groups.

"I learned how little one person is in the grand scheme of things," she said, "and how one person's work makes a huge difference in what we did. It was hard to realize how little I knew. To take on the task alone -- you wouldn't have been able to do it. You needed your team."

She said that her fellow students, evenly distributed between boys and girls, focused more on learning and less on grades or gender differences. With that in mind, Kristen-Elise intends to find a college where success is measured by personal achievement and not by intra-class competition for grades or honors.

She hopes it will work like the summer program, where "everyone's trying to beat themselves instead of trying to beat each other, like in high school," she said. "I'm looking for a place where everyone works together, and together you learn more."

(11/6/03) [[In-content Ad]]