Society News

Photons in Death Valley

Photons in Death Valley:

There’s plenty of them!

For the last decade or so, the Spousal Unit and Your Truly have volunteered as presenters at the Death Valley Dark Sky Festival. Starting out as the Mars and Mojave Festival, it has been merged with the Dark Sky Festival to become an event of unique character among the Dark Skies events hosted annually by our National Parks. This year, 6824 visitors shared our orbit for the weekend.

Death Valley is in JPL’s back yard and has been used for testing and development since the middle of the last century. Many a rover has been tested on its dunes, salt, and rock fields. Generations of geologists have trained there and learned to interpret planetary images and sensor data with its otherworldly landscapes as an analog. It’s also home to some very extreme environments. The life forms that have evolved to thrive in them inform extraterrestrial mission and instrument design.

As the photos below show, the DVDSF includes several indoor and outdoor, day and night programs, merging the themes of planetary exploration, Earth observing, astronomy, dark skies, and the search for extraterrestrial life in a way that only Death Valley can. Field walks lead by scientists, virtual events, auditorium presentations, family activities, and of course star parties with dozens of curated telescopes are offered to engage and educate.

Each year, we have driven our 6-wheeled 4-wheel-drive off-road RV, The Phoenix, out through the Mojave to camp at Texas Spring, where our skeletal greeter lives. We set up SWAG and demo tables as part of the Expo Fair held in the courtyard of the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. The schtick (demonstration pedagogy) starts with a projected rainbow from a prism and mirror on a tripod out in the courtyard to a garage-built radiometer that proves there is light you cannot see. It then moves to posters of airborne imaging spectroscopy material maps of Death Valley, and then on to live spectra collected by a field spectrometer. Chlorophyll and the red edge are featured. A crowd favorite is identifying otherwise identical-looking household white powders using a spectral signature key.

This post was original published on Mark Helmlingers LinkedIn page.