Arizona Illustrated

Tucson Celebrates Agave Experts and enthusiasts converged in Tucson to celebrate the history, culture, and culinary offerings of the agave plant at the 14th annual Agave Heritage Festival. There are six agave species that grow wild in the Tucson basin, and they are a key nutritional source for pollinators like long-nosed bats, hummingbirds, and butterflies. Cultivation of the agave century plant dates to 950 C.E. and has been used for fiber as well as a food source. How is agave consumed by humans, and what does it taste like? This piece takes viewers to an agave “piñas” roasting pit at Mission Garden and fermented beverages workshop at El Crisol. Poetry in Our Parks The beauty of the natural world has long been an inspiration for writers and poets. in April 2022, poet Jodie Hollander teamed up with the National Parks Service in Arizona to host workshops across the state celebrating national poetry month by inviting anyone who is interested to learn about the artform, reflect on their environment and even write their own poems. Event Horizon The Event Horizon Telescope is a worldwide collaboration of radio telescopes that wowed the world in 2019 by taking the first images ever captured of a black hole. The monumental undertaking was spearheaded at the University of Arizona, which operates 3 of the telescopes in the array… one on Mt. Graham, one on Kitt Peak, and even one in the South Pole. After that first image was released, the project set their sights on a much more personal target: the supermassive black hole suspected to reside at the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way – called Sagittarius A star. And in May of 2022, the team officially released that much-anticipated image in an internationally broadcasted press conference. The two images together provide the most precise tests yet for our theories of physics, and give tangible proof for black holes, the mysterious space anomalies once thought to be invisible. Field Notes: Tent Caterpillars Have you ever been in the Santa Catalina Mountains and seen strange webby sacks hanging from trees? Did you wonder what they were? Wonder no longer as producer David Fenster takes you inside the world of Tent Caterpillars. This story is part of the series Field Notes in which Fenster brings us observations from the Sonoran Desert and beyond.