Dark Night Skies
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TRANSCRIPT:
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Ian: Where Two Deserts Meet is an official podcast of Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Tree National Park acknowledges the Serrano, Cahuilla, Mojave, and Chemehuevi people as the original stewards of the land on which the park now sits. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with the indigenous people in this place. We pay our respects to the people past, present, and emerging who have been here since time in.
Donovan: Hi, I'm Donovan.
Ian: And I'm Ian.
Donovan: And we're both park rangers here at Joshua Tree National Park, where two deserts meet is a podcast where we investigate topics that often require a bit more detail, and sometimes the help of an expert in the field to gain perspective.
Ian: I got to say Donovan, don't you think it's fascinating that out of all the visitors that visit Joshua Tree National Park, most of them don't even see the other half of the other half.
Donovan: You mean like the south end of the park?
Ian: No, the other half of the park is after dark.
Donovan: Oh, you're right. I guess it is a bit strange, at least for me, since that's actually one of my favorite things here at Joshua Tree.
Ian: Yeah, the dark night sky that can be seen in Joshua Tree is so spectacular. In fact, the park is actually an international dark sky park, which essentially means that Joshua Tree National Park possesses an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and a nocturnal environment that is specifically protected for its scientific, natural, educational, cultural heritage, and for the public enjoyment.
Donovan: Especially the summer Milky Way that's visible during the new moon phase of the lunar cycle really expresses just how dark the night can get out here.
Ian: Oh yeah. I always like to remind people that one important piece of information to keep in mind when trying to plan your trip around the great night skies is check that lunar cycle. Coming to the park on a full moon versus a new moon can make a world of difference with your star visibility.
Donovan: Don't get me wrong though. Visiting the park after dark during a full moon is still great too, because to me that means that the moon will be bright enough that you can see the rocks in the Joshua trees even after the sun goes down. Especially, it's a great time to experience our nocturnal wildlife.
Ian: Ooh, yeah, A bit of a loony experience, you might say.
Donovan: Okay. Yeah, but, well, it's just something about getting to experience the night sky with the Milky Way gasses and those purples and blues covered by trillions and trillions of little glowing orbs with the occasional shooting star crossing your site. That's just really extra spectacular.
Ian: You know, I'm glad we're talking about this, Donovan. It's a good time because with the end of summer approaching a various special event is coming. The Joshua Tree, national Park Night Sky Festival.
Donovan: I love the Night Sky Festival.
Ian: Ah, yeah, same, same. The Night Sky Festival is an amazing event with astronomers, telescopes, stories, and excitement. So as we are getting ready for that event, I figured we could do a little research ahead of time to prepare for what we'll see.
Donovan: Well, you know me, I love to prepare ahead. I'll call Megan Ritchie and Stacy Manson and see if they're available to chat. They are super helpful with all things night sky.
Stacy: Hi, I'm Stacy Manson and I'm a physical science tech here at Joshua Tree. My job duties consist of monitoring three air quality stations, ten portable weather stations, monitoring groundwater, soundscapes night skies, and mitigating abandoned mine land hazards.
Megan: My name is Megan Richie, and I am also a physical science technician here at Joshua Tree National Park. I assist in natural resource monitoring, including our air quality, drilled water wells, weather stations, soundscape, dark night skies, and closing abandoned mineral lands.
Donovan: I think it's safe to say that Megan and Stacy have a long list of duties that they're in charge of here at the park. Something that was clear during the interview was their love for what they do and what inspires them to help conserve our night.
Megan: Viewing the dark sky. I had to have been around eight years old and my parents, you know, I grew up in a mid-sized city, but they woke me up in the middle of the night. We grabbed our sleeping bags and we laid out on the deck. And my memory, if my memory serves me right, I just remember looking up and just seeing meteors or flashes of light. I didn't really understand what I was looking at, but that was my first experience with the night sky. And then coming here to Joshua Tree, seeing the Milky Way for the first time, because growing up in the Southeast you don't see the Milky Way. But coming out here, I couldn't keep my eyes off the sky. I think it's a very personal experience. It's special and everybody experiences it differently. It's something that I feel that can connect you with your present, your past, and your future. I think it's just beautiful.
Stacy: For me, I think the moment that I fell in love with the sky was probably even before elementary school. Very young. My parents had a balcony off their master bedroom and they would set up a bed for us. They would take a mattress out there with sheets and blankets. Myself and my four siblings would all go out there and lay on this bed and just watch the night sky. It was a way for us to bond together to be amazed by the sky above us, to watch meteors, to just watch stars, look for constellations. It was so important as like a family unit to have that bonding experience. That kind of cemented my love of the night Skies.
Ian: So as we mentioned earlier, Joshua Tree National Park is an international dark sky. Which doesn't just mean you can see a lot of stars at night. There is also a sort of community effort going on in order to give you that experience. Stacy and Megan play key roles in working through each requirement for that designation.
Stacy: To become an international dark sky place, you first must have a group of people that are actually interested in protecting a nightscape. People that want to see the stars. Certification involves creating lighting policies, rehabilitating poor quality lighting, educating your neighbors visitors, and about the importance of why do we want to protect our night skies. And then you also must commit to that conservation effort. It's not just one and done, it's a continual commitment to protecting night skies. Park staff have been working on the certification process for years long before I even started back in 2006. The park had to inventory outdoor lighting, retrofit the poor lighting, create a lighting management plan to ensure proper outdoor lighting in the future, and then also document the average sky brightness in the park throughout different areas in the park. We also worked with community members to protect the night sky. There's been a long effort to work with the San Bernardino County to create lighting ordinances that protect the high desert communities. The park continues to educate the public about the importance of a dark night sky and participates in annual night sky festivals hosted at Sky’s the Limit Observatory in Twentynine Palms, CA every year. The park also has to submit an annual report that highlights our commitment to conserving the dark night skies in Joshua Tree. I think one of the reasons that you see that some places are dark night skies and some aren't, is some places have darker skies and you already have people that have been there for a long time going to these places to view the night skies. Places like Los Angeles, where you have a lot of artificial light and there's not a whole lot of stars to be seen, you don't have a whole lot of people living there that are like, “oh man, I wanna protect the skies,” because they just don't know those skies exist.
Megan: Yeah, and I'll piggyback off of what Stacy was talking about community engagement and just getting people outside at night and experiencing the dark sky and getting them excited and passing on their knowledge that they learned to keep our certification up because we want to protect those stars. The East Coast is littered in artificial light, but the West coast is something that we can still protect those dark skies.
Stacy: When Joshua Tree got its certification, The International Dark Sky Association was designating places on a tiered system. You had bronze, you had silver, and you had gold. Gold was like almost perfect, dark night sky, complete absent of artificial light to bronze where you could still see a decent amount of stars but there was also a lot of artificial light in the area. Joshua Tree, on our Western end, we actually meet more of that bronze criteria, but on the eastern end of the park where there's almost no communities out there, it's in the remote desert, we, we almost met the gold standard. We were able to combine those two to designate ourself as a silver tier park.
Donovan: The beauty of the night sky here at Joshua Tree National Park is that people travel from all over the world to see it. But why is that? Why do we not see the same dark night skies in our own hometowns, especially if we live in high populated areas such as big cities?
Stacy: The ability to see stars does vary based off your location. More rural areas, you're going to see more stars. More urban areas, you're going to see less stars. The reas
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