Saving the Night: Protecting Dark Skies in our National Parks

Rader Lane has been an interpretive park ranger at Grand Canyon National Park since 2010. His main duties involve connecting visitors emotionally and intellectually to the night skies through formal talks, digital media, and outreach. He coordinates the park’s Dark Skies Program, which includes the largest night sky festival in the National Park Service—the Grand Canyon Star Party—and the Astronomer in Residence Program. He works with a team in the park to measure the quality of the dark skies, retrofit park lighting, and maintain the park’s International Dark-Sky Park status. His coordination of the Dark Skies Program helped earn Grand Canyon National Park the International Dark-Sky Place of the Year Award in 2019 from the International Dark-Sky Association. 

Kevin Schindler is the historian and Public Information Officer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has worked for 28 years. Schindler contributes a bi-weekly astronomy column, “View from Mars Hill,” for the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper and has authored seven books, including Images of America: Northern Arizona Space Training, which features a chapter about the Grand Canyon. Schindler's residency focused on researching and sharing NASA’s Apollo Astronauts’ connections with the region in preparation for their historic missions to the Moon. During his residency, Schindler hosted several public programs that enhanced our visitor's understanding of the Grand Canyon's importance in the history of space exploration. 

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections. Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic and Spanish. Lauren lives in New Mexico, where she teaches through the state’s Poetry Out Loud program and her own community workshops. During her residency, Lauren spent her time writing poetry about night skies and natural darkness. She offered a few public poetry readings under the stars, which were followed by constellation talks given by park rangers. Lauren also collected poetry from visitors, asking thought-provoking questions about darkness in experimental installations throughout the park. She compiled the responses into collective poems.

Renowned educator, author, and astronomy expert Dean Regas has been the astronomer for the Cincinnati Observatory since 2000 and was co-host of the PBS program “Star Gazers” from 2010 to 2019. Regas has written over 150 astronomy articles for the Cincinnati Enquirer, has blogged for the Huffington Post, and is regularly featured on television and radio. He is also a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s Science Friday and NPR’s Here & Now, and hosts his own astronomy podcast with Anna Hehman called “Looking Up!” During his residency, Dean spent his time providing public programs for visitors both on the rim and in the canyon at Phantom Ranch. His goal was to connect visitors to the canyon's dark skies, sharing his passion for astronomy and the universe through telescope viewings, tabling, and constellation talks.