I went out to Bryce Canyon National Park for their annual Astronomy Festival!
Bryce Canyon is a certified international Dark Sky Park, and boy does it show:
Photo of the Milky Way rising above Bryce Canyon visitors. Image Credit: Peter Densmore
Photo of telescopes set up to observe planets, stars and galaxies for park visitors. Image Credit: Peter Densmore
In addition to helping answer visitors’ astronomy questions, I also gave my first outreach talk! In this talk, I did a deep dive into how elements are made!
tl;dr, light elements can be made inside of stars from fusion! Heavy elements can be made from exploding stars (called supernova) or from exotic stars called neutron stars crashing into each other!
It’s a complicated process, so you can watch me break it down in the video below: