Stellar Harvest — Center for PostNatural History

Pell designed the Stellar Harvest project to use the light-concentrating power of a large reflecting telescope to gather light from the brightest available star in the night sky for the smallest light-loving microorganisms on Earth - phytoplankton. The project will examine the ability of a type of phytoplankton known as diatoms, which are found in every aquatic environment on the planet and responsible for a significant amount of the oxygen we breathe, to grow off the light from a star.