aberti

The story behind creating and naming our favorite coyote.

Samuel Brieden, The University of Edinburgh

May 12, 2023

Welcome our new DESI ambassador for Education and Public Outreach (EPO), BaoBan! You might have met him already, when he was presenting our powerful focal plane (see a virtual tour through it here) or wishing a happy new year. From now on, BaoBan is assisting us with science communications, as long as he is in the mood. Although BaoBan is very attracted to the Mayall telescope, he shows up at Kitt Peak quite rarely because, like other wild coyotes, BaoBan spends most of his time hunting in the Arizona mountains. But whenever we are lucky enough to be honored with his visit, an aura of ancient wisdom about life and the night sky surrounding him sparks new insights and creative ideas. It’s a bit magical!

This article is a chronology of our common history with BaoBan. From the story of his ancestors, to how he was brought to life and given a name, and finally his meaning to us, to our roots as a scientific collaboration, and to our environment.

The Tohono O’odham Nation

DESI resides in the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), which sits atop I’oligam Du’ag (audio below) in the homeland of the Tohono O’odham (audio below) Nation (TON). Since time immemorial the Tohono O’odham (TO), meaning “desert people”, have lived in the Sonoran desert and preserved their rich culture. The nation is governed by the TON Tribal Government, organized into 11 districts. You can learn more about the history and culture of the TON here. We are deeply grateful for their permission to undertake observations of the night sky within the TON homeland at KPNO, and we cannot emphasize enough that the success of our scientific mission would not be possible without the TON’s generosity.

Pronunciation of “I’oligam Du’ag”

Pronunciation of “Tohono O’odham”

The DESI logo

It is this relation to the TON that must have inspired Berkeley Lab engineer (and artist!) Robin Lafever when he created the DESI logo in 2013, and in particular the detail in the lower right corner: the profile of a howling coyote. In fact, the coyote plays an important role in the TO mythology. Robin had seven different names for the coyote in mind, his favorite being “Bao Wao Wao”. “Bao” is reminiscent of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), the primary cosmological observable DESI is measuring to infer the expansion history of the universe, and “Wao” represents the coyote’s howl.

A new coyote is born

The DESI logo inspired Claire Lamman, PhD student at Harvard University and member of the DESI EPO committee, to transform Robin’s profile-view creation into a fully-fledged comic figure.  As you can see in her comic strips, at first the coyote seems nice and harmless, but the sheer power of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument occasionally evokes his dark side. All Claire’s comic strips can be found here.

Amazed by his strong character, the EPO committee considered how to introduce Claire’s extraordinary art to the public. There was only one thing missing for Claire’s comic figure to become even more successful than Looney Tunes legend Wile E. Coyote: a proper name!

Setting up a poll

Several candidates emerged from our initial brainstorming, playing either on the location of the telescope (Coyote-Kitt, Maya), on the pursued science (Cosmo-Coyote, Bao), or simply on the survey name itself (Desiree). This was so much fun that we decided to poll the entire collaboration for suggestions. Other names received were Can-do Canis, Desita, and the name of the original coyote in Robin’s DESI logo: Bao Wao Wao. Around 60 collaboration members voted in just one day, and the majority decided to conduct a naming contest within the Tohono O’odham school district (see the compilation of Slack messages below).

Back to the roots

We first consulted Jacelle Erin Ramon-Sauberan, PhD Candidate at the University of Arizona, faculty at Tohono O’odham Community College, and information specialist for AURA/NOIRLab, and worked closely with KPNO. Jacelle put us in contact with the TON Youth Council  (TONYC). The TONYC consists of four representatives from each of the 11 districts, and their mission is to enhance the cultural awareness and self-esteem of TON youth within modern times by organizing social events. The Council holds monthly meetings, which are open to the public. Francine Senechal, the TONYC Manager, kindly invited us to present the coyote naming contest at a Council meeting.

At the same time we decided to reach out to the TON, two collaboration members independently raised the idea that the name include “Ban”, the word for “coyote” in the TO language. It was suggested that we connect “Ban” with the TO word “Ba:”, meaning “Where”, such that the combination “Ba:Ban” is extendable to “Where is coyote looking?” This would allude to the mysteries of dark energy DESI is trying to unravel, and sparked the obvious idea of “BaoBan”, combining “Ba:Ban” with the previous suggestions that include “Bao”.

The day of the TONYC meeting arrived, and fortunately it was held virtually so I could attend from Barcelona. After introducing DESI and the science we pursue with it, I talked about our plan to find a name for the DESI coyote. I provided a list of all the suggestions we had collected so far, as well as their variants, meanings, pronunciations, etc., and asked them to vote for the name they found most suitable. The TONYC members were interested and very keen to help. They agreed to bring the list of names into the local youth communities of the district each of them represents, engage their members to discuss the different options, and choose their favorite name.

The final decision

After thoroughly considering all names, discussing them within each district, and exchanging their ideas at a meeting, the TONYC voted, and Francine communicated the official result:

1. BaoBan
2. Cosmo Coyote

What a great choice! Within the EPO committee we immediately fell in love with the name BaoBan, as it nicely combined all the different ideas the collaboration had in mind throughout the process. “Ban” as the TO word for coyote, reminding us of the roots of where the DESI telescope is built, and “Bao” as both the sound the coyote makes, and a clear reference to DESI’s primary science goal: measuring BAO from galaxy maps. These ideas culminated in another new comic strip by Claire (below), which celebrates that together with the TONYC we found such a beautiful name for our DESI ambassador! And there is even more to the story…

An alternative meaning

Not only did the TONYC vote for the name, they also put me in contact with TO language experts Leslie Luna and Ronald Geronimo from the TO Community College, with whom I discussed the prospect of connecting “BaoBan” to the meaning behind the similar suggestion “Ba: Ban”, where “Ba:” = “Where?” as mentioned before. As it turns out, the TO expression “Ba: ‘o …” actually means “Where is …”, but this does not imply that “Ba: ‘o Ban” would mean “Where is coyote”, because “‘o” is an auxiliary verb that must be accompanied by a full verb. However, we can extend the expression to “Ba: ‘o ñia g Ban” (audio below), which literally means “Where is coyote looking?” and argue that “BaoBan” (audio below) is just the short form of that longer name. In this way, the name BaoBan also serves as a symbol that we and the TON may work together to explore new discoveries in our beautiful sky.

Pronunciation of “Ba: ‘o ñia g Ban”

Pronunciation of “BaoBan”

Final remarks

Throughout this process it has been amazing to see how an enjoyable drawing and a simple idea (finding a name for that drawing) can lead to something big, both engaging the collaboration and establishing a new link between DESI scientists and the TO community.

BaoBan symbolizes how the enormous scientific effort by ~70 member institutions with over 700 active collaboration members from all over the world is deeply connected with the TO, who share part of their homeland to discover the mysteries of our universe. BaoBan reminds us that the night sky is the same for everyone, independent of national or cultural identity. Furthermore, BaoBan reminds us to always respect our roots and our environment, and to never forget that the deeper our maps of the cosmos become, the deeper the relationships we will foster among different cultures and people.

It is no coincidence that Robin Lafever began this processes at the very moment his pencil touched paper to create the DESI logo. Robin was known as a man with a wonderfully warm and engaging personality, who delighted everyone around him with his creativity. Almost two years after his passing he would surely be flattered that people enjoy his creation enough that they continue to develop it, from Bao Wao Wao to BaoBan.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express deep thanks to all the wonderful DESI collaborators involved in this journey, those who participated in the poll and brought in their naming suggestions, and especially Claire Lamman, Angela Berti, Biprateep Dey, Parker Fagrelius, and everyone from the DESI EPO committee. Special thanks also to Daniel Eisenstein, Dustin Lang, Eric Linder, David Sprayberry, Lori Allen, Arjun Dey, Nathalie Palanque-Delabroullie, Kyle Dawson, and Michael Levi. Finally, I am indebted to Jacelle Erin Ramon-Sauberan, Francine Senechal, Leslie Luna, and Ronald Geronimo for all their effort and kindness giving me insight into their fascinating culture.

Claire Lamman, Harvard University

April 7, 2023

DESI’s planetarium show, “5000 Eyes”, was recently released to the public. It will be shown in hundreds of planetariums around the world and translated into ten languages. The support and contributions of many DESI members grew this project far beyond the little film I initially imagined. Here is how “5000 Eyes” went from the daydream of a first-year graduate student to a global production.

A couple months after delivering my final show at Fiske Planetarium, I was sitting in a session at DESI’s 2019 summer collaboration meeting. I had committed to starting graduate school at Harvard in the fall but was undecided about a research path. I was new to cosmology and just starting to learn about DESI. When a talk started to go over my head, which was often, I imagined what a planetarium show about DESI might look like.

Kitt Peak was building an outreach center and I thought it would be nice to record myself giving a short planetarium talk about DESI that could be shown at the center. A leader from our Education and Public Outreach Committee, Parker Fagrelius, encouraged me to reach out to DESI’s director, Michael Levi, and seek funding from the DESI Institutional Board. With the enthusiastic support from Parker and Michael, I formulated a proposal to create a small planetarium film. My idea was to use as much existing media as possible—such as 3D models of the Mayall telescope, footage on Kitt Peak, and DESI data, to make the best use of any resources given to the project. It received unanimous support from the Institutional Board and I found myself, a graduate student still unsure about what my thesis would be on, in charge of a full-scale production.

Fortunately, I helped Fiske make a series of short films during my time as an undergrad at CU Boulder and generally knew what went into making a planetarium film. I developed a script based on the media available and what I knew of Fiske’s software. After many iterations on the script and feedback from DESI people, we began working with Fiske to produce the movie.

There is so much to say about DESI (just check out all the blog posts below this one!), so it was not easy to decide what to include in a 20 minute movie. One idea we wanted to make sure to communicate was that advances in modern cosmology don’t magically spring from the minds of a couple scientists. It takes many people, including many young people, with a variety of backgrounds. We came up with a selection of six DESI members from four continents. The international participants all found ways to get high-quality recordings themselves! For those of us in the U.S., we were able to coordinate an in-person shoot on Kitt Peak.

Our visit to Kitt Peak was my favorite part of making the film. We had two days with the videographer from Fiske to shoot interviews and capture footage of the telescope and mountain. During this time, the Kitt Peak Staff was especially helpful and accommodating. I was even able to carry out one of my support observing shifts in person. Up until this trip, I was hesitant about representing DESI as such a new member. But observing on the mountain made me feel like I was truly part of the collaboration for the first time.

As main production ramped up, I directed the Fiske team and coordinated some additional contributions of DESI members. In particular, once I found out that David Kirkby could make a moving 3D model of the focal plane, I knew we absolutely had to include it. Who doesn’t want to fly through a forest of robots?? He put in an impressive amount of work to faithfully bring the focal plane to life and create a memorable scene.

Fiske’s team was also very excited about the film, especially once we had the go-ahead to use galaxy positions from DESI’s full year one data. This was somewhat of a technical challenge, since they were determined to render every single galaxy and, unlike DESI, did not have access to a supercomputer! The resulting fly-through is stunning. All the time I spent using DESI data in my research did not compare to soaring through the most detailed map ever made of our nearby universe in a planetarium. I am very impressed with the work of Fiske’s production team.

Because DESI is an international collaboration, it was important to make the film widely available and in multiple languages. Many DESI members have volunteered to help create translations. As of the writing of this blog, there are plans to translate the film into 10 different languages! Small planetariums all over the world are excited to have access to a free film in their local language. The film’s download site also includes an educational guide and outreach package filled with additional material that DESI people have put together. Our science will reach a large, diverse audience thanks to the work of our collaboration!

It has been exciting to see the ways that DESI members are using this film to engage with their local communities. At the premieres, it’s also been a joy to see our family members, especially kids, get a glimpse into what we work on. Looking back, it’s a bit staggering to see how much this project has grown and how many people contributed. This truly is a film about DESI, by DESI!

As of the writing of this blog, the film has been downloaded by 112 planetariums in 31 states and 24 countries.