Caltech Stars in Otherworldly Dark Sky Festival

During the March 2024 event at Death Valley National Park, Caltech experts shared discoveries about planets, planetary systems, black holes, galaxies, and the universe with thousands of park visitors.

Caltech participates in astronomy events in national parks and other destinations to help travelers from all over America and the world learn about and enjoy the cosmos we peer into each night.

In the 2024 Dark Sky Festival in Death Valley, 15 experts from campus and seven from JPL gave talks and led interactive demonstrations. More than 3,500 visitors attended the in-depth public programs and 3,678 visited the exploration fair, despite gales, clouds, and dust that caused cancellations of stargazing and most outdoor events.

Throughout the weekend, visitors chose among free events in several formats: pub talks and trivia, auditorium presentations, astrophotography classes, an exploration fair, and, after the wind calmed, sky viewing and guided outdoor programs.

The event is produced annually by the national park, the Death Valley Natural History Association, and astronomers and planetary scientists from Caltech, the SETI Institute, and three NASA centers: Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL, which Caltech founded and manages for NASA). The Caltech Astro outreach group led by research scientist Cameron Hummels organizes participation by campus scientists. Hummels is director of astrophysics outreach activities for the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy.

"Death Valley makes the perfect location for a public science festival focused on space," Hummels says. "The night skies are incredibly dark for stargazing, and the landscape is analogous to several other planetary surfaces, such as Mars, Titan, and even Tatooine!"

As visitors entered the otherworldly national park where several Star Wars scenes set on desert planet Tatooine were filmed, they encountered curtains of sand that battered cars and back-scattered headlights. But inside Death Valley's Badwater Saloon and Wildrose Tavern, astronomers regaled crowds and spirits were high.

Eleven in-depth auditorium presentations, five of them given by Caltech and JPL speakers, connected visitors to the newest space science.

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The opening night featured a sold-out keynote talk by Planetary Science Professor Bethany Ehlmann, the Lunar Trailblazer mission's principal investigator (photo above by John Hallett / NPS). She described how the satellite will detect and map water on the Moon, and gather data on its surface's composition, temperatures, and thermophysical properties. Ehlmann is the director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies.

Later, Cameron Hummels spoke about the future of space exploration. He disentangled hype, hubris, and hope as he explained approaches that have been proposed, such as using lasers to launch a camera on solar sails to Proxima Centauri; drastically changing Mars to suit human colonizers; or building a Moon base or a space elevator.

Then, from JPL, Varoujan Gorjian gave the Saturday night keynote talk, sharing discoveries about black holes and their roles in the evolution of stars and galaxies. In another talk, JPL's Doug Ellison spoke about the unusual challenges of operating cameras on a Mars rover.

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An astrophysicist Q&A panel featuring Caltech researchers and alumni included graduate students Harshda Saxena and Nicholas Rui; scientists Nikita Kamraj (PhD '22) and Cameron Hummels; and NASA's Dominic Benford (PhD '99), seated left to right in the photo above. Questions ranged from where we are within the Milky Way (about halfway between the disk's center and its edge in an approximately 250-million-year orbit, per Hummels) to whether astronomers' skills transfer to industry ("Yes! If you've built a toolkit to solve something that's never been solved before, everyone wants you to solve their problem, too," said Benford.)

The festival featured an exploration fair in and around the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, along with guided walks and activities throughout the park.