About

I am an intern at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI), which is an observatory and ex-NASA/Department of Defence facility located some 25-30 minutes from Brevard NC if you're not in the mood to fling yourself off the mountain on the bendy road leading up to it. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not surprised: We have (I'm told) dark skies, and the government picked this place for its remote nature.

PARI has two extremely large radio telescopes on site, as well as some smaller 'scopes and a posse (gaggle? group? collective?) of optical telescopes up on one of the surrounding ridges. It currently hosts four interns besides me, as well as a decent sized staff group and a whole bunch of volunteers. There's also a bear and some turkeys, apparently. We have various tasks--nobody is doing the same thing--and I'm not sure what all of them are, because whenever somebody starts to explain the coding they're working on, my head starts to spin a little.

Pictured: One of the aforementioned extra-large telescopes, and Smiley, the face of PARI.

PARI also has a small museum. In an effort to draw attention to the site, and make the visitor experience in some way layman-friendly, I've been brought on board to renovate the thing. Why does it need renovation? Imagine you had an eccentric relative, a great-uncle or something.  Imagine your great uncle had some similarly eccentric passions: Space gadgets and memorabilia, rocks, fossils, and meteorites. Imagine he had two decently sized rooms, a rudimentary grasp of computers/smart TVs/blue-ray players, and inherited some of his collection from similarly eccentric members of an earlier generation (with penchants for calligraphy). So he set the whole thing up in a museum...ish. Everything is neatly labeled (albeit not always by the same person) and very loosely organised (the rocks are in one room, the space junk in another). Now add in a refrigerator-sized satellite...

It's a nifty little museum. It has some nice stuff. It connects to PARI's equivalent of mission control, which has all the scary-looking computers/servers/gizmos you would expect, much of it accessible to the public--the lightning tracker (important for a place with frequent thunderstorms and really big telescopes), the global lightning tracker by GA tech, the seismograph, the thing that's tracking continental drift, the cameras pointed at the telescopes to make sure they're more or less behaving, etc. It's just... difficult for somebody not already knowledgeable about space history/earth science/rocks/astronomy to get excited about. And apathetic people are also apathetic about funding, which is important.

I know basically nothing about museology (which is, I learned today, what you call the science behind museum-crafting). I've been to a bunch of museum. My parents have been dragging me to every science museum they could reasonably get me to in the southeastern US. This includes most in western NC, a few in TN, a few in AL, and a couple in SC. I've spent weeks of my life in the US Space and Rocket Centre in Alabama, and I witnessed  its transformation from an engineer's space junk filled attic into an entertaining and informative institution. (Although the biergarten under the rocket was kind of strange. Mostly due to the live german folk music.)

So, I'll be learning. This blog exists as a summary of what I'm learning, what I'm doing, and anything cool I come across during this internship. It's largely for my own use: if I don't write something down, I tend to forget it pretty quickly. Hopefully, you'll enjoy reading about it!

View from the optical ridge at twilight in the fog