Yuri's Night Bay Area at NASA Ames:
April 09-10, 2010 http://www.ynba.org
Photography by John Schultz, JP Weins, Paul Langston, Eric James, Kyle Cavallaro.
Yuri's Night Bay Area 2010 Trailer.
YNBA NASA AMES
Written by Majeka.
April 10, 2010 was a Saturday out of the ordinary. Big things were happening in Mountain View. Yuri''s Night Bay Area had returned to the NASA Ames Research Center. More importantly, I was going.
I first heard about Yuri's Night a couple of years ago when I read an article that detailed the art and science displays set up for the event, and which also mentioned the displays put on by various DJs and musicians throughout the day. It seems I was among the last to know. When I told people I was going this year, the general reaction was "Oh cool! I've always wanted to attend Yuri's Night." Of course, none of them were free to attend this year, so I ended up sharing an extra ticket with a more distant acquaintance; he immediately dubbed me the coolest person on Earth. It was nice seeing my cool points shoot through the roof, now I just needed to find out why it happened. What makes Yuri's Night so cool?
Moffett Field is big. This is something I'd never fully known, despite living within spitting distance of the airfield for most of my adult life. This is also something I hadn't really expected to learn, but it turns out that Moffett Field prohibits un-helmeted visitors from riding their bicycles on base. So I got an introduction to the airfield while walking my bike and keeping an eye out for directional signs (and a convenient lamp-post or chain-link fence).
Along the way, I chatted with a fellow who was walking in the same direction.
"My friends told me this concert happens every year and I didn't even know about it before today. What bands are you looking forward to?" he asked.
It took me a couple of seconds to realize he and I were talking about the same event. Somehow, despite seeing marquee names among the list of musical acts, I hadn't realized that some folks would attend Yuri's Night for the sole purpose of seeing the musicians. I should have known better.
There were two musical stages at Yuri's Night. Outside on the tarmac, if you couldn't hear the music drifting on the air, then you just made a beeline for the largest group of people and boom, there was the stage. People gathered before it and packed so close together they seemed like one big tribe using each other's body-heat to ward off the late evening chill. They bobbed their heads or, if they'd found a small clearing, danced in place while basking in the incandescence of the performers (N.E.R.D, The Black Keys, Les Claypool, and Common among others).
The second stage was inside one of the hangars. Here were the DJs and the less well-known performers. However, the entertainment came not just from the stage but also from the audience members who danced with abandon, like pagans in a thunderstorm. Some of them provided their own light displays: women swayed with glowing hula hoops outlining their waists and poi performers drew their own circles of admirers. (I'll also give an honorable mention in the 'Audience Entertainer' category to the guy wearing the long fur coat outfitted with glow sticks, just because I stood behind him for so long wondering where in the world one finds such a thing. And here's a shout-out to the fellow on my other side who danced like mad with one fist waving in the air and a magically un-spilled cup of beer in the other, because that's a skill almost as amazing as the hula hooping.)
Photo above - Majeka.
The first thing I saw after setting foot on the tarmac was a giant silver rocket ship, like something out of a Flash Gordon movie, and a long line of people waiting to climb the ladder and tour the cockpit. This was a fitting introduction, and an illustration of why my Burner friends were so familiar with Yuri's Night. (The rocket ship display is properly known as the "Raygun Gothic Rocketship" and it debuted at the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada.) I ambled around the tarmac for a while longer and saw more installations than I can accurately describe. Among other things, there was a fat-bellied plane with video panels on its side, and a pick-up truck with futuristic apparatus in its bed, and there was... a mini-golf course (strange but true).
Inside the hangar were interactive booth set ups, more art displays, and that's also where the scheduled talks and presentations happened. I walked in and felt like I'd finally gotten to the meat of things. This is the portion of the event that inspired me to take notes. Here are a couple of things that stuck with me:
- Many people built pyramids so a few could stand atop and look at the stars. Likewise, a few people make great discoveries and do great things to spark the imaginations of many, and in that way many people can see the stars. Our great works bind us together as a community.
Time was that when I thought about the space program at all, I tended to feel ambivalent: okay, we're on the Moon, we're on Mars... now what? Mightn't the money and resources that went into these endeavors be better spent on Earth? However, the notion above (paraphrased from Jeffrey Van Cleve's "Stargazers, Starfarers, and Kepler" talk), crystallized for me the idea of why a space program is valuable: the aspirations of a few leading to the inspiration of many.
- Dr. Peter Jenniskens, astronomer and explorer
Dr. Jenniskens' booth display featured him in a NASA cover-all, rock fragments in plastic containers, and a very thick hard-bound book entitled "Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets." This seemed very dry to me, but I wandered near anyway and was rewarded when his face lit up as he asked if I wanted to hear his story. And so I heard the tale of the first time an asteroid was tracked during its entire trip from outer space to its crashing on Earth, and learned of Dr. Jenniskens' journey to Sudan to retrieve the meteorite fragments. His storytelling was so accessible and his enthusiasm for the topic so infectious; he was a charming ambassador for a topic I'd had no interest in ten minutes before.
With the story of Dr. Peter Jenniskens, I found my final answer to what's cool about Yuri's Night: science in action is just awesome sometimes. Curiosity satisfied, I went back out to the tarmac and huddled and danced together with the people in front of the main stage, watching the Black Keys close out the show.
April 10, 2010 was a Saturday out of the ordinary. Big things were happening in Mountain View. Yuri''s Night Bay Area had returned to the 
There were two musical stages at Yuri's Night. Outside on the tarmac, if you couldn't hear the music drifting on the air, then you just made a beeline for the largest group of people and boom, there was the stage. People gathered before it and packed so close together they seemed like one big tribe using each other's body-heat to ward off the late evening chill. They bobbed their heads or, if they'd found a small clearing, danced in place while basking in the incandescence of the performers (N.E.R.D, The Black Keys, Les Claypool, and Common among others).
