The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, invited press and amateur astronomers to visit on November 17 and view a camera it’s building for a dark-energy study. Senior Editor Rich Talcott and I jumped at the chance to see the lab. Fermilab is about 2.5 hours south of Astronomy magazine’s headquarters, and we arrived with plenty of time to spare before the dark-energy event got under way.

After the information session, the 20 or so visitors loaded into a bus to see where scientists are building the Dark Energy Camera. (Rich will share more about the Dark Energy Survey and its camera in an upcoming blog.) Once we arrived, we got to go into the clean room where they’re testing the CCD chips — everyone loves booties and hairnets!

After receiving the inside-scoop tour of the Dark Energy Camera, we headed back to Fermilab headquarters — Robert Rathbun Wilson Hall, a 16-story building rising above the countryside. The lab’s public information officer, Tona Kunz, gave Rich and I a “tour” of the grounds, meaning we took the elevator to the 15th floor, which provides quite a view of the property. (Fermilab spans about 10 square miles of former farmland west of Chicago.) While looking out the windows, we wished the drizzly weather would have lifted so we could see over the entire grounds.

Tona pointed out the Tevatron, which is Fermilab’s huge particle accelerator. It consists of two beams — one composed of protons, and one of antiprotons. A series of magnets ramp up their velocities and thus energies, and the beams collide at energies of roughly 2 trillion electron volts (TeV). That’s more energetic than the energies the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detects (which are billions of electron volts).

A lot of other science is going on at Fermilab, too. For example, it’s spitting out neutrinos that a detector deep within the Soudan mine in northern Minnesota detects. Neutrinos — particles with no charge and very little mass — can change “flavors.” This project (called MINOS, or Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) looks for this change.

The some 2,000 scientists at Fermilab are also involved in a bunch of other astrophysics and cosmology projects — the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), to name a couple. The lobby of Fermilab headquarters even displays a model of CDMS. It’s a science-meets-art exhibit. The brother of a Fermilab physicist built a scale model that presents CDMS’ data in color and sound according to the detected particles’ properties.

The scale model, Fermilab’s onsite sculptures, images of particle-tracks — they all prove that science is beautiful, both on Earth and in the nebulous shapes of space.