MOUNTAIN HOME, Idaho — Mountain Home neighbors are coming together this weekend to honor Juneteenth, commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

June 19 marks the day enslaved people in Galveston Bay, Texas, were freed — more than 2 years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

WATCH | Mountain Home marks 25 years of Juneteenth Celebrations—

Mountain Home celebrates Juneteenth with a weekend of community events

The Mountain Home Juneteenth Committee hosts an annual Juneteenth 5K to honor the holiday. Saturday’s festivities continue at noon at Carl Miller Park with food, live music, games, and more.

Committee Vice President Dylisaly Reed said this year’s event marks an important milestone. 25 years ago, efforts led by former Mountain Home Mayor Joe B. McNeal helped Idaho become one of the first states to officially observe Juneteenth — though the holiday did not become an official state and federal holiday until 2021.

“It took the help and the foresight and the running, and the legacy of Dirk Kempthorne and Joe B. McNeil, who did what they had to do in order to make this happen for us,” Reed said.

RELATED | Idaho Black History Museum commemorates Juneteenth

Many neighbors said they only learned about Juneteenth a few years ago. Purvis Cowens, who attended the Mountain Home Juneteenth 5K, said awareness remains a challenge.

“We don’t talk about it in school. A lot of people of color are really not familiar with it,” Purvis Cowens said. “So it’s a good deal to get it out there and get it in the community.”

To help change that, the committee uses money raised through its events to fund 5 scholarships for local high school seniors, who write essays about what Juneteenth means to them.

Charlotte Cowens, who hosts the Mountain Home Juneteenth 5K, said understanding history is essential.

“It’s nice to know history because you got to know your history to know where you’re going. So if you don’t know where you came from, you never know where you’re going,” Charlotte Cowens said.

Reed said the scholarship has already made a meaningful impact.

“This was a young Caucasian gentleman, and he won, and he said when he did the research for his essay, he found out so many things he absolutely just never knew. And that’s all we want,” Reed said.

The committee said these events and the scholarship funds wouldn’t be possible without their sponsors, including Freer Foundation, Mountain Home Black History Committee, St. Luke’s, A Taste of Texas, and many more local businesses and churches.

To learn more about the Mountain Home Juneteenth Committee and this weekend’s events, click here.

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LAS VEGAS (FOX5) — Caltech researchers are preparing to build a radio telescope that will be the most sensitive ever constructed and survey the sky 100 times faster than any other radio telescope worldwide.

Schmidt Sciences has greenlit construction of the Deep Synoptic Array after the project completed its final design review. The milestone paves the way for construction to begin on the telescope, which is planned for a remote valley in Nevada.

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The array will consist of 1,650 radio dishes, each slightly more than 6 meters in diameter. The array will span an area of about 20 by 16 kilometers. The team plans to build the telescope by 2029, with science operations commencing soon after.

Survey capabilities

“The DSA will survey the entire visible sky several times in its first five years at unprecedented speeds,” said Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator of DSA, professor of astronomy at Caltech, and director of Caltech’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory. “While all other radio telescopes combined have so far found about 20 million radio sources, the DSA will match that in the first day of operations. By the end of its initial survey, it will have discovered about 1 billion new radio sources.”

The telescope will discover radio emission from millions of stars, galaxies, and other cosmic objects. It will address the mysteries of black holes, pulsars and fast radio bursts. It will also probe the physics of dark matter and gravity, and it will measure the structure and expansion of the universe.

“Radio astronomy is about to go from sketch to photograph,” said Vikram Ravi, the co-principal investigator of the DSA and a professor of astronomy at Caltech. “The DSA is looking at a far larger volume of the universe far more often than any other telescope.”

Real-time imaging

The DSA will be capable of making images in real time. The numerous radio dishes will feed into a supercomputer that creates images instantly. The images will be immediately accessible to the worldwide astronomical community.

“Without the radio camera, we would have to store 100 exabytes of data to complete our survey,” Hallinan said. “This would require 5 million hard drives in a multi-billion-dollar facility the size of multiple football fields. The radio camera solves this problem.”

The DSA’s radio camera will convert the raw data to images in real time with the help of an off-site supercomputer built from Graphics Processing Units built by Nvidia. The radio camera images will be given freely to the public with no proprietary period.

“We want the whole world to also have access to the data just as quickly as we do,” said Katie Jameson, the DSA lead project manager.

The DSA will have the ability to detect more than 100,000 intensely powerful flashes of radio light from fast radio bursts and to localize them to their home galaxies. The DSA will also reveal more than 20,000 new pulsars.

“The science that can be done is endless,” Hallinan said. “There will be enough discoveries to occupy every radio astronomer on the planet.”

The DSA is led by Caltech and funded by Schmidt Sciences. It is part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System. Two pathfinder projects that led to the DSA, the DSA-110 and the OVRO Long Wavelength Array, were funded by the National Science Foundation.