He had a lot of experience with observational astronomy and binary stars, but he wanted to look for exotic, or very unique binary stars. “I realized I couldn’t actually determine if the binary star candidates I looked at were chance alignments or stars that only appear to belong to a binary, or were in fact, true binary stars,” Smith said. In high school, Smith became a private pilot, flying gliders in Warner Springs, were he also worked for two summers. He graduated in 2025 from the Stanford online high school. The elder Smith has lived in Ramona for the past 40 years, where he was a teacher at both Ramona High School and Olive Peirce Middle School.