Space by Jase: DIY Festival STEM Exhibitors
Art
It’s that time of the year again! The Utah State Fairpark opens its gates to the 18th Annual Craft Lake City DIY Festival Presented By Harmons. Being Utah’s largest local-centric arts, music, science and technology festival, DIY Fest is a three-day event. Experience the best of our state’s creative culture with over 500 local artists and makers, three stages for music and dance performances, a youth entrepreneur area, a STEM building with hands-on exhibitions, dozens of food vendors and more. Kids of all ages and dogs are welcome — find more info and get tickets at craftlakecity.com!
At Jason Birch’s station in the DIY Fest STEM space, you can look through a solar scope pointed straight at the sun and, if the skies are clear, catch a live view of the star we all orbit. If you ask Birch — the astrophotographer known as @space.by.jase on Instagram and Space by Jase on YouTube — for his proudest shot, he lands on the Rosette Nebula.
“That one took me the longest,” he says. “It’s probably my most ambitious project.” It’s a 12-panel mosaic, each panel shot in three colors over three or four nights. “A total of 190 hours of total imaging,” Birch says.
Most of what he captures is invisible to the eye. NASA’s images live out past the visible spectrum, so he assigns colors we can read.
“There’s a little bit of artistry that goes into that, just so that we can see it in a way that we understand,” he says, “but the data you’re looking at itself is very scientific.”
Birch’s project is really an act of teaching, handing strangers the same jolt of scale that reordered his own life. Remembering how expansive space is, he argues it is what keeps us humble and kind: when you sit with the fact that we are “not even a speck on anything,” the things people fight over start to look a lot smaller. —Elizabeth Leach
Read more about local astronomical happenings:
Western Skies: Toohoom-pai-ahv Premieres at Ofland Escalante
Sharing the Stars: How Two Observatories Are Making Utah’s Night Skies More Accessible
To help SLUG continue highlighting the coolest DIY-ers in the city, consider becoming one of our donors!
