UCLA finance professor Francis Longstaff pursues interest in astronomy with colleagues, family

As a college student, Francis Longstaff was faced with a decision ““ go to business school or pursue a degree in astronomy.

He loved finance and found it important. Astronomy, meanwhile, had been his hobby since he bought his first telescope as a teenager. In the end, Longstaff chose to go to business school.

But after years of working in brightly lit cities like New York and Los Angeles where stargazing is next to impossible, he started looking for a better way to pursue his other interest.

That was when he decided to build his own observatory.

Accompanied by his sons, Longstaff, a professor of insurance and finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, began investigating places outside of Los Angeles that were dark enough to set up an observatory where they could enjoy stargazing.

The Longstaff family explored locations in Big Bear and the desert outside Los Angeles, but eventually decided on the pine and sagebrush-covered hills of the Los Padres National Forest, about 75 miles north of the city.

Longstaff is a member of the Polaris Observatory Association, a nonprofit organization that owns a small plot of land in the Los Padres National Forest, where its members have established several observatories. It was at this site that the Longstaff family began building their own observatory about five years ago.

Over several years, Longstaff and his family constructed the white building that would become their place to stargaze.

The observatory includes a roof that rolls away to reveal the lens of a telescope. Both the roof and the telescope can be controlled remotely.

With a webcam installed in the observatory, Longstaff can roll back the roof, aim the telescope and take his images without leaving his living room or changing out of his bathrobe and slippers, he said.

Michael Rich, an astronomy researcher at UCLA who collaborated with Longstaff in acquiring the Centurion 28 telescope that is now in the observatory, emphasized the tremendous effort that Longstaff put into the creation of the observatory.

Longstaff was responsible for constructing the building and finding a crane operator to lift the telescope into the observatory, among other tasks, Rich said.

The construction was a family effort. Longstaff’s children poured concrete, dug trenches for Internet cables and became skilled in using the telescope, Longstaff said.

“It’s been a good thing for our family in lots of ways,” Longstaff said. He said his family has enjoyed both the science and recreation associated with stargazing.

His daughter, who poured the concrete for the base of the telescope, is now studying physics at UC Santa Barbara, and all of his children are interested in science, Longstaff said.

Rich is also a member of the Polaris Observatory Association and has partnered with Longstaff to use the observatory for astronomical research.

When the two originally met, Rich was not necessarily interested in working with an amateur astronomer, he said.

But soon after their first encounter, Rich said he noticed research papers coming out in which amateurs with telescopes were making interesting discoveries.

“Within the last five years, some of the best astronomical images have been taken by amateurs,” Rich said.

Amateur astronomy has been growing, with individuals spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on high-quality telescopes, Rich said.

“There are now thousands of amateur astronomers,” Rich said. “This is a revolution that a lot of people are not aware of.”

Longstaff’s pursuit of astronomy fits into this larger trend of amateur astronomers making contributions to the field. Recently, Longstaff collaborated with Rich in the discovery of a dwarf galaxy.

Longstaff uses the observatory to produce vivid photographs of objects in the night sky, capturing stunning images of spiraling galaxies and cloud-like nebulae.

The brightly-colored photographs produced by the telescope look much different than what one would see peering through a telescope with the naked eye, Longstaff said. While the eye only collects light for a fraction of a second, a telescope can collect light for hours and can bring out fainter objects, he said.

Longstaff enhances the photos on his computer, bringing out the fine details and brilliant colors present in the final images that he posts online to share with his friends.

Longstaff shares his interest in astronomy with other faculty in the business school, such as Richard Roll, the Joel Fried Chair in Applied Finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Roll and Longstaff have discussed astronomy with other finance faculty members over lunch, and Longstaff has shown them the images of constellations and stars taken at the observatory, Roll said. Because the finance faculty consists mostly of people who are good with numbers and figures, many are interested in science and space,

Roll said.

Longstaff and his family are not the only ones who have made use of the observatory. Rich and his colleagues have used the telescope in their research, and Longstaff has received a request from another researcher to take images of a galaxy.

There is a lot of competition for use of other telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and time slots on those heavily sought-after machines are short, Longstaff said. But because there is no long approval process for the use of the one jointly owned by Longstaff and Rich, UCLA faculty could be given same-day turnaround for image requests, Longstaff said.

While the observatory has been used for scientific inquiry, it has also been a favorite place for the Longstaff family to get away from the city, Longstaff said. He fondly recalls his children chasing lizards in the chaparral landscape and peering through the telescope late at night.

It has been a good place to get away into the country and the night, he said.