Normally, Pamela refuses to think about the future. But today, on our final episode before hiatus, she’s throwing out those rules. Here’s what we’re excited about for the future, especially in the next couple of months until we return in September

Recorded: 10 June 2024, Episode 723 (Season 17) Hosted by: Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L. Gay

We are listing out all the things we think are going to happen... and in a few months we'll know how right or wrong we've been.

Fraser Cain [00:00:49] Join Patreon for an ad -free experience at patreon .com slash AstronomyCast. AstronomyCast, episode 725, looking ahead this summer. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts -based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Cain. I'm the publisher of Universe Today. With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:19] I am doing well and I am gearing up to spend my summer working on research, both science and social science. And I actually have a request for everyone out there listening to this podcast. If you could go to bit .ly slash capital A -S -T, capital E -C -O. So basically, bit .ly asked eco for astronomy economics. I'm trying to understand what factors are preventing people from getting more engaged in astronomy than they already are. Whether it be they're too busy, they have jobs, they have other hobbies. Whatever it is that might be preventing you from fully engaging the way you'd like, I want to know. And I have a survey, so please go fill it out so that I can find out more about all of you. Those links will be in our show notes, in the podcast summary, in the YouTube thing. Go click it, go fill out my survey. Thank you. Science. 

Unidentified [00:02:24] Science. 

Speaker 3 [00:02:25] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:26] So this is of course our last episode of this season. And I should really remember what season we're in. 16, 17? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:34] 17. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:36] Alright, 17. This is the last episode of season 17. We are about to begin our two -month hiatus, where we replenish our energy, work on a bunch of projects that require focused long -term attention, ability to travel, things like that. Now, normally, Pamela refuses to think about the future. But today, on our final episode before hiatus, she's throwing out those rules. 

Speaker 3 [00:03:02] It's like the purge. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:04] Here's what we're excited about for the future, especially in the next couple of months until we return in September. And we will talk about it in a second, but it's time for a break. 

Speaker 3 [00:03:14] If you've always dreamed of exploring the world, Rhodes Scholar welcomes you. Rhodes Scholar offers educational travel adventures for adults, 50 -plus, in more than 100 countries, and throughout the United States. When you travel with Rhodes Scholar, you'll be an active learner, not a passive tourist. Every day is thoughtfully planned to open your eyes to new discoveries, ideas, and people. You'll learn from local experts and meet others who share your passions. Find your next adventure at RhodesScholar .org. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:45] And we're back. All right, Pamela, first, thank you so much for allowing me to think about the future. Finally, I have so much that I think about, and you won't let me talk about it. Missions that are coming up. But you've set some very firm constraints, which is really what we're looking at in the next couple of months. And so that's brutal. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:09] Sorry. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:10] But I, you know, I'll see what I can do to get through this. But I'm always thinking about the future. Well, why don't you go first? Tell me what you're thinking about as we move into our summer hiatus. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:25] Right now, I'm thinking that the second week of July, we die as science communicators. We are potentially looking at Starliner hopefully maybe returning back to the planet Earth. They're doing lots and lots of testing of its fully discardable storage area, the trunk, that they can only do well on orbit. So they're staying up. They don't have a definitive time to return. But it's going to be in July because the spacecraft is going to expire. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:59] Well, so that's probably. Yeah. So NASA published a status update on Friday afternoon where they sort of talked about the situation and they said, OK, we said June 12th. Then we said June 19th. Then we said June 26th. Then we said July 2nd. And now, you know what? Who knows? Who knows when this thing will come home? But they said they reassured everybody that the astronauts have enough supplies to be on the station for months. It's no big deal. And there was some just just before we were recording this, there was some tentative improvements in the thruster situation on Starliner. So it might be that, in fact, they're going to get this resolved sooner than later. But and the end of schedule for the summer is wide open. They don't have a lot of missions coming to and from the International Space Station. So so there's no gigantic drumbeat. You're right. The spacecraft will expire. But but only that it's like it'll be out of warranty, only that it'll be beyond the expiry date. And come on, we've all eaten stuff out of the fridge after the expiry date on the regular. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:17] This is how I lived my life dangerously. Yeah, exactly. And and the problems that they're working on are related to the trunk, not the capsule. So there's concerns and they're getting data. But NASA is assuring everyone Boeing is assuring everyone they can get back through the atmosphere. There are no concerns. It's the trunk that they're worried about, which gets discarded and burned up in the atmosphere. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:45] Yeah. Yeah. The service module. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:47] So do you know what else is going on the second week of July, which is my personal bet for when Starliner is coming back? 

Fraser Cain [00:06:54] The launch of Ariane 6. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:59] So what is flying on Ariane 6? Oh, no, this is their new rocket. I don't know what's flying on their new rocket. Is that also the second week of July? 

Fraser Cain [00:07:08] First week, first week of July. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:09] OK, first week of July. All right. So tell us about Ariane 6. This is I know very little about this. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:15] Well, so, I mean, we all watched excitedly as James Webb launched on an Ariane 5 rocket back last Christmas. Two year and a half ago, two years ago, two years ago, more than two years ago. And this was, I think, the last Ariane 5 that Ariane's base had around. And they've been sort of kicking this around because this was the plan. And James Webb got delayed. But Ariane has been working on their next generation launcher. This is the Ariane 6. And all of the bits and pieces have all been coming together at the spaceport in French Guiana, the Kura spaceport. And they have been assembling it and putting everything together and doing tests. And the plan is to launch this on July 9th, 2024. And so, you know, will it they've completed a wet dress rehearsal. So, you know, will it actually launch exactly on time on July 9th? Almost certainly not that there is, you know, they will like a butterfly flaps in the Amazon rainforest. They will delay the launch to make sure that the wing beats haven't caused any kind of upper air disturbance. But still, this is the plan. So a few things about it. It is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen engines for both stages. It has an improved version of the engine that the Ariane 5 was using. And it also has various sort of amounts of solid rocket boosters that they can attach to this. But it's very strange that Europe has put in all this energy and effort to build this new rocket system. And yet there really isn't any reusability plans when you think about how SpaceX is just running away with the market. Now they're testing Starship that could bring a fully reusable two -stage rocket into the market. And yet still, we're not sort of seeing a big investment into reusable rocketry from Europe. So but anyway, July 9th, we should see the Ariane 6 launch. 

Pamela Gay [00:09:22] So we definitely die. The second week of July is what I am learning in terms of how much news we're going to have to tell. Because July 12th is that potential Polaris Dawn space tourist rich humans by flight on Crew Dragon. And this is where they're looking to do the first commercial EVA out of a capsule, which is about as scary as it gets, in my personal opinion. So like if you're on the International Space Station, you go into an airlock, you get suited up, you check everything out. You go into outer space after they suck all the air out of the airlock. You go back into the airlock. They put the air back in. You get undressed. Life is good. And if there's something wrong, you go into the airlock. They put the air back in. And your crewmates who have their fingers not in spacesuits fully dexterous come and rescue you. With Polaris Dawn, we're back to the situation that we saw with Apollo and Gemini. There is no airlock. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:34] Right. They just evacuate the atmosphere from the capsule and then go to open it up to space and then go for a spacewalk. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:43] Which means that they're testing spacesuits on the entire crew simultaneously. And these are not professional astronauts. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:54] No. And these are new spacesuits. So we got the reveal a couple of months ago of the new spacesuits that they're going to be using. And they look dramatically different than what NASA would use for an EVA. I mean, they look very similar to the existing spacesuits. When you see the NASA astronauts that are flying on Crew Dragon, they're these kind of sleek. They almost look like race car suits. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:22] Superhero outfits. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:23] Yeah, with a helmet. And they have no oxygen tank. Instead, they're going to be using umbilicals to connect their oxygen to the spacecraft. And so it'll be, if you think about the Gemini mission when they were doing the spacewalks on that, and you've got the astronaut in this sort of fairly sleek suit attached with an umbilical to the spacecraft, that's what you're going to get. Uh 

Pamela Gay [00:11:43] -huh. 

Speaker 3 [00:11:45] Yes. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:45] With non -professional astronauts. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:48] Yes. They've been training. Come on, how hard could it be? 

Pamela Gay [00:11:52] I'm just, yeah, I have thoughts, I have feels, I have memories of the tank that they train in down in Huntsville and all the years of underwater training and everything astronauts go through, and I have feels. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:08] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:09] But we can continue on. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:11] Sure. Do you 

Pamela Gay [00:12:12] know what else is happening that week in July? 

Fraser Cain [00:12:13] Well, you know what? I want to find out, but first we need another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:12:18] If you've always dreamed of exploring the world, Rhodes Scholar welcomes you. Rhodes Scholar offers educational travel adventures for adults, 50 plus, in more than 100 countries and throughout the United States. When you travel with Rhodes Scholar, you'll be an active learner, not a passive tourist. Every day is thoughtfully planned to open your eyes to new discoveries, ideas, and people. You'll learn from local experts and meet others who share your passions. Find your next adventure at RhodesScholar .org. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:49] And we're back. Uh, what else is happening that July? 

Pamela Gay [00:12:53] Have you heard of a little mission called Chandrayaan 3? 

Fraser Cain [00:12:57] Yes. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:59] It's July 14th, nominal launch. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:03] I had no idea Chandrayaan 3 was launching this quickly. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:08] Yeah. So Chandrayaan 3 should be going up July 14th, give or take. That's always the case. This is India's next foray into lunar exploration, where they're looking to achieve a soft landing. They have a next generation rover. They're hoping to rove this time. And so hopefully we're about to see a new nation successfully soft landing and roving on the surface of the moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:32] Oh, that's really cool. Speaking of the moon, we've got the sample return mission coming back from Chang 'e 6, which landed in early June, collected its samples, deployed a rover. That's main job was to take selfie images of the lander. And it was able to extract a sample from several meters below the surface of the moon, which is really cool. And then it used an ascent capsule to fly our ascent module to fly up into orbit, docked with the return capsule. And the return capsule has been on its way back to Earth. And it's going to be reentering the Earth's atmosphere on June 25th. Now we're recording this on June 24th, but by the time you hear this, it will have already returned. And there's no changing the schedule on this. This is the orbit that's coming in. And so hopefully scientists will have access to samples from the far side of the moon for the first time, which is going to be pretty exciting. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:35] It's just this wild period that we're suddenly in that seems to have started two or three weeks ago where the planet has gone spaceship crazy. And it's a good problem to have. But as a space journalist, it's just sort of like, where did these all come from? And couldn't you have spaced yourselves out? Because, wow, it's just remarkable and amazing. And then, of course, we're looking for Starship 5 test launch sometime this summer. They're working on doing updates to the current Starship. Having watched, oblation is the word I'm going to choose to use, occur. I'm going to let you explain that one as you giggle over there. 

Speaker 3 [00:15:22] Well, right. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:23] So, I mean, for those of you who did watch the fourth launch of Starship, it was tremendous. It was quite an exciting time. Now, the first stage, one of its engines failed, but it was still able to reach the right velocity. It was able to do its boost back burn and landed gently into the ocean and then sunk to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. And then Starship flew up to orbit and then did its reentry maneuver. And we could see the amazing ionized gasses coming off of the spacecraft as it was reentering the Earth's atmosphere. And then the gasses kept getting sort of hotter. And then you could start to see bits and pieces of debris and like wounds opening up on one of the grid, more of the fins that it uses to stabilize itself. And then it just kept burning and you could see like fires inside and yet it continued to work, you know, the little thing that could. And they also were able to land gently in the ocean and then sink to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. And we've heard a lot of comments from the SpaceX folks that they're going to be attempting their next launch sooner than later. So we're probably they've streamlined the FAA process so that they should be able to get their approvals a lot more quickly. And so we should see another test this time provisionally. The plan is to attempt to actually capture the super heavy booster on the launch tower. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:59] And if they fail too profoundly, they lose their FAA fast track because you have to have an investigation when you destroy things. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:10] But they're also building a second one. So if they lose one, then they've got to spare. And they're actually building two of them in Florida as well. So within the next couple of years, they're going to have four launch platforms. And then, you know, you just lose one every few months. Who cares? Classic SpaceX style. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:27] And it's kind of imperative in a way. I never thought I'd find myself saying that they get this done quickly because they are relying on the whole Starship brand. I don't know if that's quite the right word. Model moving forward so they can get to development of the Starship HLS, the Artemis program. And if the Artemis program gets delayed, that means we have a great vacuum of funding from NASA occurring again. The way we had a vacuum when Curiosity had issues, the way we had a vacuum when JWST was delayed for a decade -ish. It felt like a decade. So we need Starship to get back on track so that we can have at least one test landing, which requires on -orbit refueling of the still not flown at all Starship HLS before the tentative no earlier than September 26. I think it's 26. Is it September 26 or 25? 

Fraser Cain [00:18:37] Oh, 26. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:38] Okay. Of a human, a crewed Starship HLS. So we need this to work. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:48] And if you were going to take this brand new skyscraper -sized spacecraft and figure out a way that you were going to test it in incremental approaches to get to the point that you felt reasonably comfortable with this being a fully functional spacecraft, what kinds of test payloads would you assign to it? Where would putting humans inside of the thing show up on your Gantt chart? For me, it would be right at the very end. And yet, the only approved payload for a Starship is people. Isn't that crazy? 

Pamela Gay [00:19:35] The only NASA approved. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:36] No, the only approved, the only confirmed Starship. And before, it was also people with the Dear Moon, but that's been canceled. So really... Wait, 

Pamela Gay [00:19:47] Dear Moon was last week. When did it get canceled? No, not Dear Moon. I'm thinking Blue Moon. Ignore me. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:53] No, Dear Moon. Yeah, Dear Moon. This is the Japanese billionaire who's going to take a bunch of people around the moon. That's been canceled. But so you would think like, let's launch a telescope. Let's launch bricks. Let's launch whatever, water. Let's try refueling, all this kind of stuff. But no, unfortunately... But 

Pamela Gay [00:20:12] the next generation Starlinks. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:15] Sure. But none have actually, they haven't said we're going to launch Starlinks. No one has put down any calendar. Here's the payload. Here's the timeline. It's just the only thing that is confirmed is putting humans into this thing to land them on the moon. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:31] That's wild because SpaceX sent out messages to their Starlink consumers on boats saying, what translates to, for the love of God, do not be a boat in the wrong place because we're trying to get you a spacecraft that can launch the next generation Starlinks that will make your situation better. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:52] We know this is the plan. People ask, what are they going to use Starship for? They're going to launch 40 ,000 Starlinks. They're going to launch big, powerful Starlinks at infinitum as they take all of the telecommunications money on planet Earth. That's the plan. And so any other uses of Starship are incremental at best compared to that plan. But there is no right now. I'm surprised they could have filled the last Starship with Starlinks, but they didn't. So maybe the next one will have them or they're just going to keep testing them empty. I don't know. All right, we're going to take another break. 

Speaker 3 [00:21:34] If you've always dreamed of exploring the world, Rhodes Scholar welcomes you. Rhodes Scholar offers educational travel adventures for adults 50 -plus in more than 100 countries and throughout the United States. When you travel with Rhodes Scholar, you'll be an active learner, not a passive tourist. Every day is thoughtfully planned to open your eyes to new discoveries, ideas, and people. You'll learn from local experts and meet others who share your passions. Find your next adventure at RhodesScholar .org. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:06] And we're back. All right. OK, so I've got another one for you. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:12] Go for it. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:13] Which is that the IAU, the International Astronomy Union, has its meeting in early September. Sorry, August. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:21] Last week of August. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:23] No, it's August. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:25] Well, it's the middle two weeks of August. 

Speaker 3 [00:22:28] August 6th. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:28] I currently have a SAD because I have registration, I have a hotel, and I don't have funding to actually go. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:38] Right, to South Africa. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:40] Yeah. 

Speaker 3 [00:22:40] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:42] I'm a member of the IAU. 

Speaker 3 [00:22:44] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:44] I sit on committees. This is, I have SADs. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:50] Well, maybe you should talk to CosmoQuest about sending you to the IAU. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:55] I know, I know. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:57] So, I mean, this is, I always say that people who live in academia live in a bit of a sort of weird fantasy land when they're like, oh, are you going to go to this conference? I'm like, of course not. I don't have $5 ,000 to spend to fly to this data hotel to go to that conference. That's ridiculous. Oh, I guess, yeah, maybe that is a lot of money. 

Speaker 3 [00:23:18] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:18] So, of course. And so now you have to prioritize your budget. And keeping employees employed, keeping the servers running is more important than attending a conference. 

Pamela Gay [00:23:32] But I can be sad. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:34] Yes, absolutely. And what if Pluto's vote comes up again? 

Pamela Gay [00:23:39] Yeah, that's not going to happen. But, but anyways, yes, IAU is in August. And then in September, moving on to somehow I'm like all spacecraft today. So the other thing that I'm paying attention to, because again, I am deeply concerned about the Artemis program becoming the great vacuum that removes all science funding from NASA. New Glenn is going to have its first launch, hopefully late September, early October. And they need the New Glenn rocket to work so they can carry the Blue Moon lander in the future, which is what they're looking to use for Artemis V. So we are now on a race between Starship, which has many different purposes, and Starship HLS is a special model just for NASA. We are on a race between SpaceX getting Starship HLS done and human certified. And now Blue Moon riding on New Glenn, getting the new rocket certified and getting first their Mark 1 cargo and then their Mark 2 human certified doing their thing on the moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:53] I am not going to hold my breath. I mean, we have been waiting 15 years to see New Glenn. Yes, we've seen New Shepard fly, but we have just not seen anything of New Glenn. And I understand that this rocket does exist, according to people out there. You know, I have to see this thing actually fly before I will. I'm going to pull a Pamela on this one, which is just like I await some kind of confirmation that this is even a thing because we have been. I've wasted so much time reporting on things that Blue Origin is planning to do. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:43] That's fair. Yeah, that is fair. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:45] So I can tell you something that is going to happen, which is that we are going to cross the two year mark of observations from James Webb. So even though it did launch in around Christmas time, it released its first science data in July of 2022. And so now we are about to cross into that two year mark. And last year we did a here's everything that James Webb saw in the first year of observations. And so we're working on year two. So it's a second, you know, all the cool new science that was done with James Webb in the second year. And this is just going to be a monster. Like, there's so much science that we've been reporting on that I wouldn't be surprised if our video is like an hour and a half long. It's crazy how much work, how much amazing stuff has been done. So cool pictures, quasars, farthest known galaxy. Like just today, just today, Webb saw globular star clusters forming through a gravitational lens in a galaxy seen when the universe was only 400 million years old. Crazy. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:58] I hadn't seen that yet. 

Speaker 3 [00:26:59] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:00] The thing that caught my attention is, like, we always talk about how a fragmenting spiraling cloud should form stars that are co -aligned -ish. And we hadn't been able to see it. And I was like, meh, OK, a theory that's good, that makes sense. I will teach it. Probably never see it. And JWST saw it. 

Speaker 3 [00:27:21] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:22] So yeah, the serpent's main filament has order of 20 protostar outflows that appear to be aligned within plus or minus 24 degrees. Yeah, it's just kind of wild. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:39] Yeah, like all of these protostars are lining up their beams with each other. 

Speaker 3 [00:27:44] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:44] Crazy. What else you got? 

Pamela Gay [00:27:47] So I have one thing that is not happening that I want to talk about. 

Speaker 3 [00:27:51] OK. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:53] We still don't have first light on Reuben Observatory. And for, like, the past three seasons, I've been like, and next year LSST is going to get its start. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:04] Spring 25. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:06] Yeah. Yeah. Not so OK with this. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:09] I'm fine. 

Speaker 3 [00:28:11] It'll be worth it. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:12] It's going to be worth it. So there's a couple of things that I think we should just, like, things that happen every year that I'm really excited about. So I guess, well, astronomy -wise, there's this new nova that's going to be appearing at some point in the next couple of months. So probably by the time the hiatus is over, the nova will have appeared. And, you know, you need to know your constellations pretty well to know where this, it's corona borealis. And it is this, like, cup, looks like a cup, that is in between Hercules and Vega, in between Arcturus and Vega. And so if you know where Hercules is and you know where Bootes is, you can measure in between the two of them and you can find corona borealis. It's, you know, if you do watch the sky, then you're familiar with it. And then there will be one additional star. It's a one that will be roughly the brightness of Polaris. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:14] And this is something that should be visible to most of the world. This is a fairly equatorial constellation. And it's really expected that this will happen before September based on prior eruptions of this system. It's a two -star system. You have a compact object that is nomming material off of its companion. It's anticipated to get a bit too full and go flare with light as a nova. It's something we haven't seen. And we're now finally going to get to see it with massive telescopes that can track how it goes back to normal afterwards. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:51] But I think for regular people, unfortunately, it's going to feel underwhelming. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:56] It's nothing. Yeah. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:58] Yeah. That only if you really knew your constellation, you'd be like, oh, yeah, extra star there. But everybody else, can I see the nova? And I have to say, yeah, but first, here's how you find coronal borealis. Check out all these stars. Here's the new one over there. That's it. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:17] If we're lucky, it goes off towards the beginning of August when hopefully everyone's going outside for the Perseids anyways. There's a first quarter moon. So the first half of the night is going to be kind of miserable with moonlight. But Perseids, you can usually count on for one or two meteors a minute and plan to go camping and get up before dawn. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:41] Well, that was the thing that I want to talk about was the return of the Perseids and the return of the core of the Milky Way. So yeah, you know, Perseids in early August and then and the Milky Way is already making an appearance early and earlier in the evening. And that brings you all of those amazing star clusters and nebulae and just the core of our amazing galaxy. And so the nights as the nights get warmer in the northern hemisphere, then we get nice things to watch. The meteors, the Milky Way. It's a good time to be outside sky watching. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:18] These are the things we're looking forward to and to look ahead to next season. Europa Clipper finally should take off. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:25] That's in October, though, right? 

Pamela Gay [00:31:27] October 10th. Like I said, looking ahead to next season. I'm allowed to occasionally get excited early. Again, I'm also afraid of things that don't leave the planet eating budgets. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:38] I should be encouraging this anyway. 

Speaker 3 [00:31:40] You're right. It's good. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:41] We should definitely think about things that are happening in the future. It's fun, isn't it? 

Pamela Gay [00:31:46] No, because the reason I'm looking ahead is because I'm worried about them. I'm deeply, deeply worried about them. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:53] Well, we've run out of time. We've run out of season. So, Pamela, it's been a blast for this 17th season of Astronomy Cast. I hope you're going to have fun this summer or at least get a bunch of stuff done off your plate. Some summer cleaning of projects. I know I will. We'll still be in touch, but hopefully, everybody, we will see all of you when we return in September. Now, do you have some final names to thank? 

Pamela Gay [00:32:28] I do. I would like to thank the $10 amount and up patrons, Kellyanne and David Parker, Kenneth Ryan, Kim Barron, Kimberly Reich, Klombadurov loves science, Christian Golden, Christian Magschlott, Kinsey Penflenko, Larry Dzot, Laura Kettleson, Lee Harborn, Les Howard, Lou Zeeland, Marco Ierasi, Mark Stephen, Raznak, Masa Haleu, Matt Rucker, Matthew Horstman, Mathias Hayden, Maxim Left, MHW 1961 Super Symmetrical, Michael Hartford, Michael Purcell, Michael Regan, Michelle Cullen, Mike Heise, Naila, Nate Detweiler, Paul D. Disney, Paul Esposito, Paul L. Hayden, Peter, Philip Grand, Philip Walker, Planetar, Richard Drum, Robert Cordova, Robert Hunt, Robert Polasma, Ron Thorson, Ruben McCarthy, Zebra Lark, Sam Brooks and his mom, Sharesome, Scott Beaver, Scott Briggs, Scott Cohn, Sean Matz, Semyon Torfuson, Siggy Kemmler, Simon Partson, Slug, Stephen Veidt, Sterling Gray, Stephen Coffey, The Air Major, The Big Squish Squash, The Lonely Sand Person, Thomas Gazeta, Tim Garrish, Timelord Iroh, Tasha Nakini, Wanderer M101, Will Hamilton, William Andrews and Zero Chill. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:07] Thanks everyone. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:08] Thank you everyone and see you next season. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:12] Bye bye. 

Pamela Gay [00:34:19] Astronomycast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomycast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. So love it, share it and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today's show topic on our website, Astronomycast .com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon .com slash Astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomycast. Marvin's expansive range of options ensures you'll find the perfect fit for your style and needs. Discover the Mountain West windows and doors difference at our showrooms in Scottsdale, Gilbert, Flagstaff and Tucson. Start your journey today at MWWD .com. 

The next great eclipse is upon us, with viewers across North America witnessing the moon passing in front of the Sun. It’s an amazing experience, but also an opportunity to do science. Let’s talk about what we can learn from this momentous event.

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:04] Astronomy Cast episodes 715. How to watch a total solar eclipse and do some science. Welcome to Astronomy Cast for weekly, facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. IPam, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:01:26] I am doing much better than last week, and I would like to say to everyone who stuck through it. Thank you. While we were trying to record that episode, everything on my screen was flashing red and I have to give a special thanks and a special shout out to Richard Drumm, our editor for hiding most of the chaos that was returning and to our patrons who allow us to pay him. It turns out that our local fiber trunk was in the process of being sliced through while we were recording the episode, and about ten minutes after we were done with like, fighting the internet gods to keep things going. All internet was lost for about 24 hours. Local construction. The message we got from our provider was fabulous. It was a third party doing construction sliced through the fiber trunk. Oh, we don't know when it will be fixed. It was the most passive aggressive. Wonderful. And thank you all for your patience. Thank you, Rich, so much. And patrons, you're the ones that allow us to keep going and have as close to excellent as we can get. When I'm distracted by red flashing lights as possible episodes when all the red lights are flashing. Thank you, thank you, all of you. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:49] Yeah, any episode would have been twice as long with us troubleshooting live during the episode. Is it you? Is it me? Is it the YouTube? No. YouTube? Yeah, yeah. It turns out your fiber connection was being degraded in real time while we were attempting to do the episode. I'm amazed we got through it as much as you did, because, yeah, you sent me a text message maybe 15 minutes after we closed, like, well, we're all offline, and it was a disaster, so. I'm amazed. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:23] So thank you, everyone. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:25] All right. The next great eclipse is upon us, with viewers across North America witnessing the moon passing in front of the sun. It's an amazing experience, but also an opportunity to do some science. Let's talk about what we can learn from this momentous event, and how to maximize your chance of getting it in your eyeballs. All right, Pamela, you are a veteran eclipse hunter. How many total solar eclipses have you witnessed in all of your years of chasing after eclipses? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:58] Zero. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:58] Zero. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:00] The running joke is you want to be anywhere but near me. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:04] That's my plan this year. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:06] Yeah, yeah. So the two of us were both vaguely together for 2017. I was I on the floor of the stadium in Carbondale. And you were out in the observing field in Carbondale? Yep. And I had a slightly bigger than the sun sized cloud go in front of the sun just at totality, and you got to see totality. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:30] I but I got maybe five seconds of totality right at the. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:35] You're still seeing it. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:37] I guess I have. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:37] Not yet saw Corona. I have never seen Corona. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:40] Yeah, I guess I. I'm going to still say that I saw zero. Oh, but but but you. But you've tried a few times now. So yeah. Each time you get to that. Yeah. All right. And so I think this, this is going to cast a long shadow, pardon the pun, over our recommendation. So, so we're going to get into the science with this. But but first I think it's really important for us to just give general advice about about how to maximize your chances of getting the best experience for the total solar eclipse, if you're going to be in the eclipse, and I'm like 30 million people in North America live under the path, just live. You step outside, look up, you will see the eclipse. And then there's all the people that are coming from elsewhere, like me, like you, to try and get under the eclipse path. So first step one, let's just talk about safety because it's absolutely critical. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:38] Yes, I a lot of people have a lot of misinformation. If you're going to try and use welding glass, it has to be 14 or higher. So the myth that you can just use a welding visor is, is like on Rotten Tomatoes where they're like, there is a grain of truth in there somewhere, but it's not true. Right. It's it's much more a case of you have to have level 14 or higher. The best thing to do is to not try and get yourself welding glasses. They're heavy, they're thick. They cost a whole lot of money. Instead, get yourself a pair of ISO certified eclipse glasses. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:21] So the, the, the American Astronomical Society has a page where they describe vendors. You can buy them on Amazon. Still you're looking for the ISO certified. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:34] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:35] Look, you know, I mean, I know it's really tricky to buy stuff on Amazon, especially last minute. There's a lot of people are going to try and sell stuff. People are freaking out about fakes. I wouldn't be that concerned with it. And there's some tests that you can do when you get the glasses that you can just double check to make sure that they are good enough. So how do you do that? 

Pamela Gay [00:06:55] So. It's AI unless it's ISO certified. I can't say where I might get sued that you can see if it's safe or not, because at home no one has the stuff to see if it's ISO certified. What you can do is is the basic make sure it doesn't have any pinholes in it. Yeah. Make sure that it doesn't have any scratches. And holding your glasses up to a very bright light is a good step one. Yeah. Step two is to hold them up to the sun and not have them plastered up against your eyes, but sort of like, okay, does that look entirely dark? Because I'm looking at it. Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky story, but the main goal is you shouldn't be able to see any bright light through your glasses. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:47] Exactly. And anecdotally in the chat, I've seen that Walmart has plenty of them. And I think that's a good way to go because if this late in the game now, if you're going to try to go to Amazon then yeah you might get a pair. That's not great. But if you just go to Walmart or whatever, and as long it says ISO certified, that is the that's the code word that you're looking for. That will mean that these glasses are the right level of darkening for you to be able to see it. Target. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:15] Rainbow Symphony Online is where I would go, actually. You can still get them from Rainbow Symphony and their stuff's ISO certified. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:21] Okay, yeah. So ISO certified. That's really looking for from any of these places. Just it should have written on it ISO certified and then you're good to go. All right. So that's the safety thing. But there's more nuance to this because you can look at the sun and in fact you get the best experience when you do look at the sun. But but there is a timing thing. So explain when it's unsafe to look at the sun and when is it safe to look at the sun? 

Pamela Gay [00:08:48] The only time it is safe to look at the sun without an eclipse viewer, or using a safe solar viewer of some sort is during totality. There are apps that you can get that will play a sound when the moon completely blocks out that main disk of the sun, and there, it will make a sound when the moon starts to leave that main disk of the sun. And it's only during that few minutes or less period of time, depending on where you're located, under the path of totality. Yeah. Where you can take your glasses off. Yeah. And you really do want to take your glasses. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:30] You totally do. And this is the key. Yeah. So you want to make sure that you are definitely in the path of totality, and you're watching with your glasses, and you're going to see this little final sliver diamond right at the very edge of the sun. And then when that goes away, when you pretty much can't see the sun anymore with your glasses, then you can take your glasses off, and you should be able to see the sun in the corona. And then. And the trickier part is when that sun is going to return. Because then on the flip side, you get that little diamond appear again on the sun. And so as you said, if you got some timer, that's great. But it's like the second you start to see a brightening, put the glasses back. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:08] It's over. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:09] Yeah. It's over. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:11] And the thing to think about is looking at the solar corona during totality. That's like the same amount of light as a full moon. It's not even as bright as a full moon. That's an exaggeration. But it's safe to look at the full moon. It's safe to look at the solar corona. Yeah. The rest of the time, there were cases after 2017 of people who managed to burn the crescent sun into the retina. You don't want to burn the crescent sun into your retina. That's just the wrong kind of scarring to get on purpose. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:46] And don't mess with binoculars or telescopes unless you've got proper safety equipment. Yeah, like I, I can't even like I wouldn't even in the middle of totality. I wouldn't look at them at the sun. Now, with binoculars, even though it's safe, it's going to be unsafe in a in a heartbeat. And the second there's a little bit of sunlight, it's burning your retinas. So I wouldn't even take I would not take the risk. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:14] One thing that is safe to do, as long as you have glass lenses, because otherwise you're going to melt your telescope. And that's a very expensive thing to do by accident, is you can project the sun onto a wall under a board. Yeah. Or. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:29] So with camera, whatever you want to do. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:31] Yeah, yeah. So I, if I have the opportunity, will be projecting the sun through binoculars on a tripod, and that's a perfectly safe way. And there's even easier ways to do this. You can simply have something that you have punched a hole in with a three ring punch and use that to project the sun. And one of the coolest things I learned about is disco balls are very good at reflecting light, but they aren't dangerous about reflecting light. And so you can just get a disco ball out there, have it scatter images of the sun in all directions, and every one of those little square pieces of mirror is going to give you a perfect projection of the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:17] Yeah. All right. We're going to talk about how to maximize your experience in a second, but it's time for another break. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:24] This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Time is one of the most valuable things each of us have in this modern economy. Many of us, myself included, feel the need to hustle to finish one job and start the next. It sometimes feels like the only me time I have is what I steal from myself. Each night as I read just one more chapter a few too many times, finding time that is meant for me. Too many of us leave ourselves out when planning our day. And this is where BetterHelp comes in. Working with their counselors, you can work to define what is important to you and how to make it a priority. Therapy can help you find what matters to you so you can do more of it. If you have been thinking about starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. Early in the pandemic, hearing an ad like this on another podcast got me to give it a try, and I learned coping mechanisms I need it. BetterHelp is entirely online, designed to be flexible, and you can switch therapists at any time. To get started, just fill out an online questionnaire. That's it. They'll match you and get you started. Learn to make time. For what? Makes you happy with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/astronomy today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. Help slash astronomy. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:01] And we're back. All right, we got the safety warnings out of the way. So let's talk about how you maximize your chance to not be Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:11] Well, I mean, the best thing you can do is position yourself next to a highway near the path or under the path, and be prepared with maps and with a full tank of gas. And look at the weather models the night before and plan a run for it. Now this eclipse is quite polite, so you will have the ability to get up and say, I'm going to make a break for it and decide which way to go. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:42] Yep. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:43] It enters, Mexico. The eclipse starts at 1107 Pacific in Mexico, here in Saint Louis, where we're about the midpoint in the United States, maxes out at 2 p.m.. We're at 99%. I'll be down in Carbondale, where it's 100% at 1:59 p.m., and it leaves into Canada at 3:33 p.m.. And I have to admit, I was not able to find the times that it was going through Canada because everyone is like, yeah, don't go there. The weather. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:14] Is terrible. I'm a Canadian. I'm not going to Canada, now. And so I think there's this sort of state, the strategic plan that you have to think about. So, so a few days in advance, you have to look at those weather forecasts and say, yeah, what regions are expected to have sunny skies and then you've got to choose to go to one of those, like if it's where you are, great, you did it, you won. But otherwise you're going to have to go. It looks like it's going to be sunny 100km north for me or 100km south for me. And so you're going to have to plan to be there. And, and as you said be close to a highway. But there's going to be a lot of traffic congestion. And so being away from a highway is also good if you can just take back the. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:01] Rural. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:02] Routes. Yeah. If you can't rural routes to get where you need to go then then that might be the the path to go as well, because the highways could just be chock a block and you're stuck in it. You know, people ask me like, well, I want to, you know, what's the right place to see it? What's the what's the best situation and scenery and like, it doesn't matter. None of that matters if all that matters is that you can see the sun from where you are, and you could be the dense forest. And you find a little spot, an opening in the in the trees you can see the sun, you can be in the plains, whatever. I would avoid places where a lot of people are expecting to go, because you're not going to be able to get out and you're not going to be able to stay mobile. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:45] The coolest story I've heard from anyone so far is, a fellow who in rural Illinois was like, I'm going to go up to my. They build these towers that you can hunt deer from. It's a thing. Deer stands. So he went up into his deer stand in rural Illinois. He's the only one for miles. There were trees around. And of course there were deer because they feed deer from deer stands. And he said, all the deer in the herd came and lay down and pretended like, well, I mean, they didn't pretend for them. It was real, right? It was time to settle down. And there's actually now subprojects out there for observing animals and submitting data, because researchers are still trying to figure out what of all of these stories that people tell are real or imagined and what is actually happening. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:40] So the the analogy that I always use is think of don't think of this like a picnic. Don't think of this like you're going to go someplace you can sit down. You can bring your friends, you family, you can sit around, think of this like a heist that you are considering your escape routes you are considering, you know, keep the car running and and you're going to have a bunch of ideas, like, if we have to go north and we're going to go here, and if we have to go south, that we're going to go over there. And even on the day, a few hours, the clouds are coming in. But you know that there's clear skies 100km north. You got to drive. And then even in the moment, minutes before you're looking at the various clouds, and this is the thing that you couldn't do. That's the thing that I couldn't do. But we had friends that did. They got in their cars and they even in some cases they ran to get out from under a cloud because because, you know, it's just you. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:33] Can see the clouds coming across the field and you can run. Yeah. Standing in front of the cloud, it's ridiculous. Yes. It's a big. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:41] Dodge that cloud. If if there's just a bunch of fluffy clouds around in all directions, then yeah, you're going to have to move. And so you're going to need to replace a field, rural streets, places where you can move and not get hit by car. And so think about your safety, but also think about how to get to a place where you are going to get clear skies because it's two minutes and then it's done, and then you just then you can take as long as you need to get home again in horrible traffic. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:08] Yeah. Yeah. Can I recommend pausing, picking up food, eating some of the food, and then just being prepared to treat this like the longest munchie car ride ever. On your way home? 

Fraser Cain [00:19:24] Yeah, exactly. Now, what about cameras? Because a lot of people ask, you know, I talked to a bunch of people, and they're, like, telling me this is their first time, but they're also going to bring in their camera gear and they're going to try and capture the eclipse. What do you think about taking pictures of eclipse? 

Pamela Gay [00:19:37] So there is software that you can get for jailbroken cameras that will control the exposure times for you. You set up your camera, you get it going with the software and it just goes and does its own thing. Now, if you're in a situation where you can have your jailbroken camera that you are utterly ignoring like it is dead to you during totality, that's fine. Yeah. Do not be messing with your exposures. Do not be touching your camera. Do not be looking through your viewfinder. None of this is is a good use of that seconds to minutes that you have in the shadow of the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:18] Unless you've seen multiple it. Unless you're bored of watching total solar eclipses with your own eyeballs, then consider trying to take a picture of it. Or if you're a pro. But it is. It is one of the most complicated astrophotography shots to do because you're going from full sunlight. Yeah, to no sunlight. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:42] And so people are pulling filters off. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:44] Yeah. The exposure requirements are different that you have to put any filters on top of it. And after removing a change exposures, all of that and all of this time as you're fussing with your camera, with your back to the sun, you are not experiencing the solar eclipse and you have to do the solar eclipse. And so and so my recommendation is like, unless you've seen a bunch of these and you know what you're doing and you're an experienced astrophotographer, don't even bother bringing the camera. You cannot capture the magic in your soul that you experience from seeing the eclipse. And you will just ruin your experience by attempting to fast with your gear. Don't do it. It's a it's a newbie trap. All right, so people are watching it, but they want to take their enthusiasm to the next level. How can they participate in some science while this is happening? 

Pamela Gay [00:21:40] So the projects that you can still get involved in. Aren't all that exciting. If you're dreaming of recreating, general activity observations or something. Those projects, those people. So we have the modern Eddington experiment. We have Project Kate. They have been doing practice observations for months so that it will be muscle memory during the eclipse. So there are citizen science projects out there that are observation based, looking at the sun, fancy equipment. They are amazing. I can't wait to see their results for you. Dear humans watching this right now, the kinds of things that we have available for you are the globe which does globe at night, and a variety of other science projects. They have a project where they're asking people to measure the temperature change from before the partial phase starts all the way through the partial phase, through totality and out, and also measuring the percent cloud cover. And they're trying to better understand the correlation between clouds temperature and, phase of the eclipse that is being experienced, to make sense of all of these stories about totality, had some clouds go away. There are a lot of stories people have, not me. I'm not one of those people. There are a lot of stories other people have about how that occurs, and they're trying to get to the science of that. There is also projects to understand what exactly happens with the wildlife. So here we have the soundscapes project, Google Eclipse soundscapes. You can still get involved in a variety of different roles. They have people both observing what's going on around them, putting up, audio recorders to actually measure both comparison data 24 hours or more ahead of time and afterwards. And then during the eclipse, seeing when things get twilight colored, what happens at midday? How are these animals responding? I'm really excited about the soundscape project. This is an extremely well done project that also allows people who are differently abled to fully be involved in the project in a variety of different ways, which we don't see very often. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:01] Yeah, it's really cool. And so. We'll put some links in the show notes for people to be able to to access some of these projects. And so not just to the science actually NASA now is doing some science as well. So on a chase plane I know, I know, it's so amazing. They're going to they're going to and they're going to send a rocket. They can do sounding rocket. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:26] I'm much more excited about the chase planes because when you're in the path of totality, there is just something cool about looking up, seeing the Jets go by, and knowing those chase planes are literally working to keep their butts in the shadow of the sun, measuring what's going on with our atmosphere throughout the entirety of totality. There's also all sorts of weather balloon projects that are going on. So our atmosphere responds to the sun, responds to the solar energy, it responds to the magnetic field of the sun. And all of these different things are getting shadowed to different amounts. Yeah. Where there are people who are going to be out there looking at changes in radio signal, changes in how our ionosphere is working, there's actually a ham radio project that is, collaborating with all these other NASA projects to see how far they can bounce radio signals through the ionosphere during totality. Essentially, this is the one free chance we get to look at the middle layers of the solar corona. See how the magnetic energy is getting transformed into heat by looking at how these layers of the corona that we otherwise never get to see are changing and moving. We get to see the electron density flowing through that magnetic field. All of this is stuff normally hidden from us entirely by that bright disk of the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:01] Yeah, yeah. So the these chase planes, I mean, it's it's crazy. I mean, the eclipse shadow's moving so fast, you don't realize, but it is moving at well over 1000km/h. And so you still only get a little extra time of totality as you're flying in the, in the chase plane, but it's enough to just do more new double or triple the science. And there's some weird stuff that happens during eclipses, like temperature changes, cloud changes that happen. And what's great is that it's this way to introduce this one variable. You make this, everything is the same. It's the middle of the day time. You know what the normal weather conditions are. You know the normal climate conditions are. And you remove the sun right from each one of these places along the entire eclipse path. And this just informs scientists an enormous amount. There's a there's a weird tendency for clouds, for light clouds to disappear. Yeah. As the eclipse is beginning. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:00] And it's finally getting understood. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:03] Slowly and hopefully they're going to understand. Yeah, yeah. So there's you'd think after hundreds of eclipses that people have been able to see over hundreds of years. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:16] And this is one of the things the, the ability to get high quality equipment and high quality weather in the same place is statistically like it just does not happen the way you would expect. Eddington back in 1919 was super lucky with taking the images he did and seeing as many stars near the edge of the sun as he did allow and confirmation of general relativity. Now he was able to confirm that near the edge of the sun there is a, bending of the light of about 1.75 arc seconds. We know that the amount that the light is bent should decrease in a well-understood way. As you go further and further from the edge of the sun. Those numbers still haven't been fully confirmed. Like we trust them. We believe them, but they aren't confirmed, and folks have been trying to confirm them since those original measurements. And they're going to try again this year to confirm. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:27] What Eddington saw. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:29] This this function of distance with the modern Eddington experiment. And I read a paper on all the things that have plagued past measurements, from perfect weather and not enough stars to enough stars and imperfect weather. It's just a cursed experiment. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:47] Yep, yep. It's really interesting. Well, I think on this note. Good luck. Everybody getting a chance to see the eclipse. Those of you who aren't gonna be able to travel to it, you will be able to watch versions of it online, I'm sure. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:02] And partial eclipse for everyone in North America. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:05] And right. But remember, 99% is is. Nope. You know, if you can if you could see 99%, you could see 100%. So don't. It's 99% is unacceptable. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:18] And there's research showing that this actually causes brain chemistry things to happen. Wow. And there's ongoing research. This this is as close to the overview effect as you get while all over the planet. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:31] That's awesome. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:31] So go experience it. Feel all the endorphins I have never felt. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:36] You know. Oh, this is it. This is your year. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:39] And I have rain forecast. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:41] Oh, I'll do you. Oh, I haven't even even dared look at my long range forecast. I was just going to freak me out in Texas. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:48] Yeah, I know, I'm attached to a sound board on the floor of the Carbondale Stadium again, so. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:53] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:54] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:55] All right. Well, Pamela, thank you so much. Good luck. And we'll talk in a couple of weeks after we both experience our versions of this amazing adventure. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:04] And and thank you to all the patrons who make this and everything else we do possible. We thank the $10 and up folks at the end of our episode. You are are I shall mispronounce your names category of donors and you make all the difference. All of you, even even the folks who throw $1 at us once a year. Maybe it makes all the difference. We appreciate you so much this week I would like to thank by name, which I will mispronounce, time Lord IRA, Robert Handel, Paula Esposito, Michael Hartford, just me and the cat, will Hamilton, Jeff McDonald, Lee ha, born Katie Byrne, Conrad Holling, Thomas Gazeta. Jarvis, Earl. Tosh, Nana. Kimmy Mike. Hazy, Bob. Crail, Greg. Wilde. John. Baptiste. Lamont. Ney, Noah. Albertson, Cody. Rose, Michael. Purcell, Sterling. Gray, Adam W, Simeon. Thompson, Mark. Schneider, Michael. Chandler. Astor, Bob. Galactic president, superstar MC scopes a lot. I love that one. And John Theys, thank you all so very much for everything you do. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:23] All right. Thanks everyone. We'll see you next week. No, in two weeks. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:26] Two weeks, two weeks. Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of the Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gang. You can get more information on today's show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

Science in the Shadows: NASA Selects 5 Experiments for 2024 Total Solar Eclipse (NASA)

Clouds Vanish During a Solar Eclipse, And We Finally Know Why (ScienceAlert)

Citizen CATE 2024 | Chasing the Total Solar Eclipse 2024 (SWRI)

WB-57 | Chasing the Total Solar Eclipse 2024 (SWRI)

April's total solar eclipse promises to be the best yet for experiments (AP News)

Five Fascinating Science Projects Using the Total Solar Eclipse to Illuminate New Discoveries (Smithsonian)

SwRI leads airborne, ground-based 2024 eclipse observation projects (SWRI)

Just a warning, the holidays are rapidly approaching. It’s time, once again, to think about what to buy all the space nerds on your lists. Here’s what we like.

Show Notes

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Frasier Cain [00:01:50] Astronomy cast. Episode 699. Our holiday gift guide. Welcome. Just trying to be cast for a weekly, fact based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I'm Fraser Cain, I'm the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, panel, how you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:10] I'm doing well, but I have to admit, I am not emotionally prepared for this episode. My Halloween decorations are still in the yard. I have not done my grocery shopping. It is still September in my head, right? Good lord. How did we get here? 

Frasier Cain [00:02:31] Yeah, yeah. I mean, one time marches inexorably on. Also, you know, we are getting ahead of, you know, we were recording this show. It won't show up for another week. That'll be like just after your Thanksgiving. And I feel like after you finish your Thanksgiving, that is the moment where in your mind, Christmas and the holiday season starts to loom large. So I think the timing is off. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:56] Yeah. Saturday is making tamales out of leftovers and putting up Christmas decorations. 

Frasier Cain [00:03:02] That sounds good. Now I need to warn people I'm not in my typical studio. I'm on the road. I'm recording with less wonderful recording equipment, so. But hopefully it still sounds okay. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:13] You still say. 

Frasier Cain [00:03:14] Good? Yeah. And it'll be. I'm using a cool gadget. I'm using a DGI, microphone system, and I. I really like it, actually. Very simple. And I'll be here for the next four weeks, so just I apologize in advance. But this is going to be my reality right now. Hopefully it's not too bad. So just a warning. The holidays are rapidly approaching. It's time once again to think about what to buy all the space nerds on your list. Here's what we like. All right, we do this every year, but, like, things always remain the same as well. So do we want to talk about the things that will always remain the same, or we won't talk about the things that are new that we like. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:57] So I, I decided to add things like board games this year. And there are a bunch of new books, not all of which I have read, but many of which are on the list today because I want someone to buy them for me. 

Frasier Cain [00:04:15] Oh, right. Wait a minute. Is that what today is? Today is a holiday list for Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:22] Well, at least with with a couple of the very few, very few things, but. Okay. Does it happen? 

Frasier Cain [00:04:29] Yeah. All right. Well, let's let's just start. I mean, where do you want to go for games? You want to start with, with, books. Movies? Gear. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:39] Let's do fourth gear, because let's just get that out of the way and, and go through what we need to. 

Frasier Cain [00:04:46] Okay? So if you have a person in your life that is wanting to get into astronomy. What do we always recommend as the first piece of reasonably inexpensive kit that you should acquire. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:04] But not you learn spar killers? 

Frasier Cain [00:05:07] Yeah. Why? Do you have any opinion? I guess there's like three classes of this, right? There's, like, nice small traveling binoculars. Yeah, good astronomical binoculars. And then there is the Cadillac of binoculars. So, so we'll start with the traveling ones. You know, like, any binoculars work great. You want know binoculars. And you're looking for those two numbers eight times 35, seven times 35. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:41] And by 50. 

Frasier Cain [00:05:42] Ten by 50. Ideally, maximize the second number. And don't be so concerned about the first number. The first number is the magnification. So it's like seven times it's eight times it's ten times. Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter. The second number though is the size of the eyepiece in or the size of the aperture in millimeters. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:05] Light gathering. 

Frasier Cain [00:06:07] And that's the amount of light that is getting gathered. The more light that you gather, the fainter the object you're going to be able to see. You want that number to be bigger. So but they're all kind of the same. So eight by seven by 30 fives, eight by 50, ten by 50. Whatever is like a nice size and small. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:26] Yeah. What I usually look for is a field of view. That's a couple of degrees because that makes star hopping super easy. And then maximize the, the, size of the front end as big as I can afford. First, don't buy something you can't afford. And second, as big as I can hold steady with my hands right there. There are times when it's amazing to have giant binoculars that require a tripod, or require you to be laying down, and like, balancing them with your elbows on the ground. But most of the time, you just want something that you can carry out into your backyard and just look up while in a hammock. 

Frasier Cain [00:07:14] And you shouldn't be spending more than 50 bucks for this. Like they're reasonably inexpensive. But if you want to spend more on a pair of binoculars and you do want that one, that's going to give you a better view, then you want to go to the astronomical binoculars. And those will have numbers like 25 times 75, 15 by 75 or 25 times by 100. And so 100 millimeter, 75 millimeter lenses with higher magnification. And they're amazing. Like they're. Yes. You fall into the sky. It's the power is incredible. But they're heavy. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:51] Yeah. Yeah. It's it's a it's a good way to figure out whether or not you have small muscle trembles and build up your, ability to rate things in that like bucket at arm's length challenge. That's what giant binoculars are. 

Frasier Cain [00:08:07] And if you are willing, you know, if you've got like a nice spot that you can sit layback and you've got some, some tripod that can hold them, but they come with a tripod holder often or you know, they have a tripod mount. Yeah, put on a tripod and then yeah use them and you don't have to hold them and jiggle them. But the Cadillac of these are the image stabilizing binoculars. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:30] Yes. These you're you're looking sometimes upwards of $1,000. But the nice thing about them is some of the fanciest ones can even snap images inside of their electronics, which is kind of wild. Whoa. But yeah. Yeah, but you can. You can be in a windy circumstance. You can be on a boat. They tolerate all sorts of weird environmental issues and just regular everyday my hands shake. No big deal. And allow your eyes to just take in those photons and show you the nebulae. 

Frasier Cain [00:09:13] And, I mean, we're a lot more experienced with this kind of thing. Like when you, when you take video with your iPhone or, you know, or you've got like a nice little dSLR, it's got some kind of image stabilization built in. That's what it's like. You are. Yeah. You are looking at the sky and then you press the image stabilization button and then the sky just it turns into a photograph in your vision and not but you know, things can be happening. But it is rock solid. And that makes everything. And it's hard to undersell how wonderful that kind of thing is. But these are expensive. I mean, you're looking at upwards of a thousand bucks for a pair of image stabilizing binoculars. Even bigger ones can be more expensive, but they are glorious. And so if you really want to impress the pants off of somebody, I highly recommend. You know, if you want to be, if you've got something really special to buy for someone who is really going to be into this and they they really will do the heavy lifting. You can look at birds, you can see stuff at night, space. It's just great. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:20] One of the things you want to look for, if you're using them for astronomy, is to make sure they have an reflective overcoat. When you're birding, there's a whole lot of daylight, so you don't worry about it. So if you're buying them and they are designed for birdwatching, they're not going to be as good at night because they reflect a significant portion of the light that's hitting those giant apertures and the giant apertures, what good is it? Have a giant aperture if the lens is just going to reflect the light. But those over coatings allow the light to go through the lens instead of getting reflected off of it. 

Frasier Cain [00:10:54] All right. Let's talk about telescopes okay. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:57] All right. Dobsonian, if you want to use your eyeballs. 

Frasier Cain [00:11:00] Classic answer. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:02] And a simple Schmidt case if you want to start astrophotography. 

Frasier Cain [00:11:10] I'm going to replace that recommendation. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:12] Really? 

Frasier Cain [00:11:13] Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:14] So are you going to, like a unique Stella or something? Yeah. 

Frasier Cain [00:11:17] Yeah. So I'm 100% can agree with you. Like, if you want to get into astronomy, you don't want to spend too much money. You want a nice light bucket, you want a dobsonian get a six inch or an eight inch six. You just fine. Eight inches. Yeah, right. Ten inches too much. Don't be tempted to go bigger. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:36] It's too hard to move. So you want to use it? 

Frasier Cain [00:11:39] Yep. And it's simple. Easy to use with a nice finder. Once you learn the sky, you can look around very quickly and find what you're looking for. I would have agreed with you for that. Like the next step with a with an automatic, like with the with the Schmidt cast. With a. You know, with a camera on board. Take pictures. Yeah, yeah, but I don't recommend that anymore. Because they are still very complicated to use. They do different images, but the polar alignment on them is just takes so long. And at the end of the day, you're not looking to spend the $10,000. You're going to spend a few thousand dollars to get that set up, and it's going to not be good enough for what you want. And so I think if you're going to want them, if it's not good enough for what you want as well, I recommend these automated telescopes. So, both unit and Venus make these. They are. You know, I'm not going to lie. They're 3 to $4000. But they are idiot proof. You take this thing outside, you've set it down with a clear view. The night sky. You turn it on, it finds its way around the sky, recognizes where it is. And then you just say, let's take pictures of Andromeda and just turns to Andromeda and just start taking pictures. And it's magical. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:59] I will add the caveat that I tried using one of the Venus ones, that that I had to do reviews, and it was so bitterly cold here that the telescope was like, I shall not. 

Frasier Cain [00:13:14] Write. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:14] I will not. 

Frasier Cain [00:13:15] I'm not sure if they sort of what the temperature ranges are, but. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:21] Minus ten was not right. 

Frasier Cain [00:13:25] That seems really civilize, right. Because you think you put it outside, you get back inside and then you're just controlling it with your phone and you're taking pictures. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:32] Well, and that's what I tried to do. And it said, no, I'm not going to write. So, so just have the caveat that in my personal experience with them, they prefer to be warmer than not. 

Frasier Cain [00:13:45] Right. Well, we don't know. I mean, who knows? I could have been that model. Could have been the battery. Who knows? 

Pamela Gay [00:13:50] And batteries in general don't like being minus ten. Yeah. And they are battery driven. 

Frasier Cain [00:13:55] Yep. And so just, you know, you see, like the camera, the best camera is the one you're going to use. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:01] Yeah. Like, if you've. 

Frasier Cain [00:14:02] Ever if you've had any kind of telescope that has a, a automated drive on it and you go outside and you tell your friends, oh, Jupiter is up, let's go look at Jupiter. And then you're just a second, I just did wait a second. I can't seem to get it into. Hold on a minute. And then, you know, your friends are packing up their cars. They're going home. You wait just a second, and then finally, three hours later, you finally polar aligned it like it's. If you know what you're doing and really comfortable. The telescope is in a place where you know and you've gone through the the polar alignment process hundreds of times and sure, yeah, go that route. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:39] Or you don't care. I will often carry my refractor out to the sidewalk to show things to my neighbor's kids. Yeah, no polar alignment meant I am using a 20 millimeter plus a lens, a big field of view point the telescope, and I just constantly adjust it. 

Frasier Cain [00:14:56] And that's your dobsonian like, that's what the dobsonian will get you. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:00] Well, and that's and it just happens to be I have the refractor. So yeah, I'm treating my refractor like a dobsonian. 

Frasier Cain [00:15:08] Right. Exactly. So if you, if you want the really quick, let's see what's up in the sky. Oh look, the moon looks really nice tonight. That's your dobsonian. If you want it to start getting into astrophotography. And I say start because it is the beginning of the rabbit hole, then these automated telescopes are great, but you know, and we're not going to make this sort of holiday recommendation for you to go out and spend $10,000 in a proper oh, no geography rig, but you will get to a point where that's the kind of gear that you're going to want to buy, to do the kind of astrophotography that you've become accustomed to seeing. And so what these automated telescopes do is they get you there fast. And I and I think that's worth so much. And so if you if you're the kind of person that wants to get into astrophotography, you don't want a lot of time to mess around and you want to just get results. These things are there. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:01] And and you know, stellar has a super cool collaboration with the Study Institute to do a variety of citizen science projects. 

Frasier Cain [00:16:09] Yeah, you can do science with these telescopes. Yeah. Great. It's so cool. Yep. All right. So now we'll move into where you want to go now to games. You want to go books. You want to go. What do you want. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:21] I want to start by recommending a truly silly, makes you think and not entirely scientific game, but it's simply a pure delight to play. And this game is called abduction eight. Abduction, as in little rubber duckies. And the idea is that you are a scientist developing technology to travel through space. And your test subjects are these ducks that do not get hurt during the process. And your goal is. To get your ducks to align into different configurations, including, like the constellation Cassiopeia, Orion's belt, it is a delight. It's a pattern matching game that requires a fair amount of strategy, but it is also luck based because you have a silicon UFO that all the little rubber duckies go in and you pull the pieces out and you don't know what you're going to get, and you have to align them by colors and patterns on the cosmic flow stream. 

Frasier Cain [00:17:30] And this is a physical board game. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:32] It's a physical board game. It is truly delightful. And you're playing with little tiny rubber ducks and a UFO. 

Frasier Cain [00:17:40] Oh, that's super fun. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:41] Amazing. It's amazing. They are not a sponsor of the show. They could be. 

Frasier Cain [00:17:45] Nothing. Nothing is the sponsor of the show that we're talking about today. Apart from what? If there's a sponsorship message and then. Thank you. Sponsor. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:53] Right, right. But that's not part of the gift guide. No, I. 

Frasier Cain [00:17:57] Haven't played board games in a long time now. So I'm going to put my emphasis on on video games. And before we get into that, I just want to reiterate how much I love the Steam Deck, which is the yes the Co I've got one here. You always with me. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:14] On straight above me through the ceiling. 

Frasier Cain [00:18:17] Yeah okay. All right. Drill a big hole to bring it down. Like, the Steam Deck has just been a revolutionary device for me because I just have. I have so many games in my backlog that I just never got to. Because, like, I've got to sit down in front of my computer, and. Yeah, and I do that all day. I don't want to sit in front of my computer for one second longer, but I want a game. And so with the Steam Deck, my entire steam library is available, and I could just sit on the couch. I can sit on, you know, I can lie on the bed and I can play games and and I haven't found a game so far that doesn't adapt nicely once you get a little used to it, suddenly you're. I've been playing Rimworld now and it's the best. And I was totally against it. And now it's working on the Steam Deck. Just great. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:04] So so you you don't have to simply obsess over figuring out how to reconfigure everything to work on the stream deck, because you can easily attach a dongle for USB and mouse. So like, I have completely used adaptive commands for things like Carcassonne, but for Minecraft where like my brain is fully of the belief that you should be doing certain things with a trackpad and keyboard. I just use those. It's fine. 

Frasier Cain [00:19:36] I think you would be surprised how if you just toughed through the controls on the Steam Deck for a little while, it'll start to make sense, and suddenly you won't want to go back to a mouse and keyboard. Like it's a bunch of stuff that I've been like. I've been playing. As I said, I've been playing Rimworld. That is just the quintessential mouse keyboard game with Cod keys and all this kind of stuff. I've been playing stellaris, which again is just a really complicated game, and yet I'm able to play it with the with the Steam Deck and then stuff that you see that is a lot more straightforward then it's effortless. And, and if you just like, you feel guilty about a large backlog of video games and you want to get through them, get a Steam Deck. And, you know, I bought both of my kids a Steam Deck for their Christmas and birthday presents, which is sort of breaking the rule, but that's the one I gave was I gave a Steam Deck to each kid. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:31] That. 

Frasier Cain [00:20:31] Will not be on sale this summer. And so I bought them. And then I set them aside. And then I couldn't wait till their birthdays and Christmas. And so I was like, here's your birthday and Christmas present, and that's it. All right. Yeah. And like, I know a lot of people get switches, but like, the games on the switch are the killer. They're 70 bucks, right? To buy the Nintendo games while on. You probably already have hundreds of games in your steam library. And so that's why I recommend the Steam Deck. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:58] And, and there's Steam Deck games that range in price from a couple of bucks to, again, the $70. But steam regularly has sales. You can get things through Humble Bundles. So there's this level of availability of things that you just don't have the same way with, with a switch. But other games, shall we look at other games? I for one, I'm going to go for the board games because. 

Frasier Cain [00:21:29] Sure. Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:30] So more board games. 

Frasier Cain [00:21:32] Yeah. So what else. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:34] So so the other one that I'm playing, it's called Space Base. This is a resource gathering game where your goal is to, to well, you're a Commodore of a space bass and you're trying to keep everything alive. You're trying to draft new ships into your fleet. You're trying to do basically all the. Things you see in a sci fi show, but in the context of a game that is simple enough to play, that you're not going to spend 30 minutes explaining to everyone at the table how to play the game. You're just going to sit down and talk through the instructions while you play the first time, and then just keep playing it. And the games are short enough that it's not like Arkham Horror, where people are like, you disappeared nine hours ago. What happened? Right? You can play a good game for 45 minutes. It's it's just a nice turnaround and it's straightforward. 

Frasier Cain [00:22:31] Yeah. Are the dogs okay? 

Pamela Gay [00:22:35] So sort of. I was hoping the mic didn't pick up on them. A fire truck went by and when a fire truck goes by, my dogs have to sing with the fire truck. It's what they. 

Frasier Cain [00:22:46] Do, right? All right, well, I'm going to be talking about video games, so I mentioned this briefly, but I've been playing a lot of Rimworld, of course, but I like I think I make that recommendation every year, like I'm up to 1200 hours of playing this game. It's so good. It's it is. And I mention this at some point. It is objectively the best video game ever made. And I this is my hill and I will die. But, but, but I've also been playing a lot of stellaris. And if you're a fan of the kind of that classic like Master of Orion two is sort of like the best example of genre galactic civilizations. But stellaris is the paradox version of this game. Paradox makes for a lot of games like, Europa Universalis and and Pong Crusader Kings. So a lot of these are grand strategy games. Yeah. But and so they've taken this approach for the classic space game where you're, you're settling new worlds and you're building a fleet and you're fighting enemy races and you're having a grand old time. And but they do a great job of in the beginning, they have these weird little story events where you find some mystery on a world or and if you're willing, you know, each one is has slight risks and really to take those on, you get advantages that start to snowball your empire. And then in the mid stage, there are all of these, ancient civilizations that are round there, other events that start to happen that you have to deal with. And you, you know, that you've got to get yourself ready to a position where you're going to be able to take on this. And then in the end stage of these sort of apocalyptic events where scourge of the Promethean scourge comes in from another galaxy and wipe tries to wipe you out. And just the base game. The problem of paradox games is, like a lot of additional games require a lot of paradox games require a lot of additional parts. But I would say with this, you really don't need any of the additional expansions. The base game itself is is delightful and fun, so still highly recommend it. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:58] Well, I'm I'm going to wander back to, board games because. Why not? So we don't. 

Frasier Cain [00:25:07] Just have here board game nerdery. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:10] I'm in a safe space like I'm on my personal wish list of, like, there's the stuff you do if you win the lottery, like in doll things pay off your house, pay off your student loans. And then there's the stuff that you know you should only do in limited amounts. But part of my if I win the lottery is to to redo a room in our house with, like the board game bookshelves that are designed to hold the board games and a board game table. And at this point, I would honestly settle for the the rods you can buy to adopt the the Ikea Kallax shelves for board games. I'm that person. I am that person. Yeah, but to recommend games. Astronaut. It's it's a game of solar system exploration by Dante Lauretta, who was p.i. Of the OSIRIS-REx mission. Okay. And it's just cool because it has real science in it, including some of the sadnesses of like having to try and deal with a government shutdown. And as we keep prolonging how long it's going to be until we shut down the U.S. government again, this game just happens to come to mind. Alongside, astronaut, we also have, well, not associated with the scientists. There is a quest for planet nine. It's another card game style game where you're trying to get out and explore a planet that's been discovered in the outer solar systems. So if if you can't actually explore, at least buy a board game that allows you to dream. And if you do want that, I'm playing this game for five hours. How did this happen? Experience. Wow. Terraforming Mars and Terraforming Venus are here to fill your evening with very thick instruction books. Once you figure them out, they're good. But the first time you play it, it will be a journey. You have been warned. 

Frasier Cain [00:27:18] So I wrote a couple of books to recommend. I've had a chance to interview. So one is called The Little Book of Aliens, and this is by Adam Frank, and he is one of my favorite researchers, explainers. And he has done a lot of research into astrobiology and wrote up a nice book that sort of encapsulates the entire, sort of field as it stands today. And, you know, where we looking, what are the techniques and so on. And I did an interview with him, but but his book was great. The other one is, Siri on Mars. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:54] Yes, that one's on my. I want somebody to please get it for me list. 

Frasier Cain [00:27:58] Yeah, yeah. And that's by Zach and Kelly Smith and and they are great because yeah they started out going like what's it going to be like to to, you know when we have a base on Mars and we'll have a base on the moon and, and they've realized just how awful and difficult those places are going to be. And it sort of changed their entire perspective. And it's nice to see a really realistic perspective on what it's going to take you to actually colonize space, because, you know, science fiction has been linear. It's filling our minds a lot of nonsense. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:28] It's true, it's true. Expanse gets it pretty right. They're pretty clear on how miserable spaces. But. 

Frasier Cain [00:28:34] Sure. So just how easy it is. And so the last book is called A Space Shuttle Stories, and this is by astronaut Tom Jones, and he interviewed 135, or if you interviewed 130 shuttle astronauts over and was able to get stories about all 135 space shuttle missions. And so there's like one story for each one of the missions. And so you can you can just get a sense from the people who lived through it, what it was like to to run that mission, run all those missions. And so if you want to learn more about the special space shuttle story. So those are my those are my three fresh space books, which I've read and really enjoyed. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:17] Very cool. And and I'm gonna recommend it's it's science adjacent. I'm going to recommend, N.K. Jamison's The fifth season trilogy. Currently, our planet has a whole lot of volcanism going down in places where there's live cams Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico City, Iceland's getting ready to go boom and may have gone boom by the time you're listening to this. All these different volcanoes going on right now, it just felt like the right time for me to give the series a reread. It's about what goes wrong if we completely destabilize the geophysics of our world, and what it is like to live on a planet that keeps becoming fairly uninhabitable due to volcanism and earthquakes. 

Frasier Cain [00:30:06] And, well, this is like your favorite subject. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:09] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I am so, so to stay on, but I'm going to distract the entire audience for one moment. Go on this journey with me. There have been these amazing videos showing how the town of Grenada in Iceland is growing a giant crack across the town. And while it's always terrible for human homes to be destroyed and for infrastructure that has been paid for to be damaged, one small thing that is bringing me and my. That's just a good narrative voice in my head, joy is the crack goes through the archeological site of an ancient Viking temple, which means there is a non-zero probability that the eruption will start in an ancient Viking temple. And if you have to have a volcano going off inside of a city and you have to destroy archeological ruins, this is how I want it to happen. 

Frasier Cain [00:31:12] That's pretty funny. All right, well, hopefully, we've given you all a new list of ideas, as well as some classic standards to help, satisfy the the happiness of everyone on your your wish list. Thanks, Campbell. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:29] Thank you, Fraser, and thank you to everyone out in our audience this week. We want to in particular, thank, Scott Briggs, Jim McGeehan, Frodo, Tanner Barr, J Alex Anderson, father Prax Bruce, Amazon planner star Jeff Glenn McDavid, Semansky the ER major John Drake, Nyla Zulu Zeeland, Scott Cohen, Marco Rossi, Georgie Ivanov, the big squish squash David Gates, Scott Bieber, Matthew Horstman, Matthias Hayden, Justin Proctor, Aaron Zegras, Don Mendes, Cooper, Benjamin. Mueller, Peter Philip Grand and Cami Russell. Thank you all so very much. 

Frasier Cain [00:32:20] Thanks everyone. We'll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:21] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today's show topic on our website. AstronomyCast.com. This episode was brought to you. Thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

If you’re in dark skies and look up, you’re certain to see a satellite. Lots of them. But how can you know which one you’re seeing, and how can you improve your chances of a sighting? Today we’ll talk about how to see satellites, or avoid seeing them.

(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:42] Astronomy Cast Episode 673. How to see satellites or avoid them. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we don't. I'm Fraser Cain, the publisher of Universe Today. With me is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. What are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:02] I am doing well, I. I appear to be spending my day amused at the antics of artificial intelligence, and I feel like I need to do a PSA that if you have that new Samsung phone with the 100 X and you taken imaging for the moon, it's not actually the moon that you photographed. It's it's. Well, you did photograph the moon and now it's giving you somebody else's picture of the moon because that's how Samsung's AI is rocking. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:30] Now is that true? Yeah, because I've. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:34] Heard I've. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:35] Heard that that confirmation is also suspect. So like like press photos sharing to show what the moon looks like. I mean, the impression I get is that it's doing I upscaling on your pictures, so might just be somebody else's picture, but it is attempting to upscale the picture that you've taken. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:57] So the the test that was done, I was someone downloaded a picture of the moon, degraded it, blurred it out and displayed it on a monitor, and then took a picture of what they displayed on the monitor. And the phone came back with something that was, containing information that was not in the original picture. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:21] Yeah, that sounds like upscale AI upscaling to me. In my. And they do that. I mean they smooth out your image. They smooth out your picture. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:30] Within an added resolution. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:32] Yeah. Yeah. That's that's what the upscaling is right for. It's Photoshop. So that's my like people want better pictures and I mean like the my phone my Google phone totally messes with the shadows in the light areas to try and balance the picture. It'll remove wrinkles on your face. So we're deeply into this world where the pictures that you take are, are the pictures that you want, not the pictures that you took. I think this is where we're getting to with all this kind of stuff. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:07] I don't like this. This is not the future I requested. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:11] Which just use a dSLR. Then I do. Perfect. Well, then don't worry about it. Okay? And then everyone else can use their bold glamor filter on TikTok and their teenage view. The teenage version of themselves. All right, so if you're in dark skies and you look up, you're certain to see a satellite. Lots of them. But how can you know which one you're seeing? And how can you improve your chances of a sighting? Today we're gonna talk about how to see satellites or avoid seeing them. I, I am ambivalent today. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:45] Because that's so unlike you. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:48] I know, I know, I have so much joy, so much happiness seeing satellites in my as a child and through. Even now I go outside, I look up, I see a satellite. I'm like, cool. Yeah, space. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:03] Yeah, right. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:03] That's that could be the enterprise passing over. But then on the other hand, we know this more and more and more of them, and they are going to be making our axis of space harder. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:16] When, when was the last time you went out and just, like, spent a night in either a hammock or a lawn chair or, God forbid, actually lying on the ground where there are spiders and just looking at the sky the entire night. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:30] A couple, a couple of years to do, like the whole night. Like I'll definitely even now I'll go outside just. And if it's clear skies because they're so rare here, let's go to Canada this time of year. I go outside and I'm like, oh, it's clear. And then we'll go outside and we'll bundle up and we'll just watch the sky for as long as we can handle it. But yeah, it's been a couple of years for just going outside, laying down under the stars. And I usually pass out in a couple of hours though, so I'm not I'm not built for this. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:57] Yeah, I, I lost one out about a year and a half ago. And so, so. The the constellations of satellites were in full swing. We we had Starlink was starting to function and going outside and looking up, trying to see a meteor shower in Illinois was a matter of look. Oh, shoot, because it was either a satellite or a lightning bug. Most of the time. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:30] That we don't have, that would be awesome. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:34] The lightning bugs were truly awesome, but the satellites initially had the exact same feeling as you, and like one of my most powerful memories of Dark Skies was sitting out on a big old rock at the base of a glacier when I was a high schooler and got to go glacier climbing and just watching satellites. I had never seen them before. And and so this was like what it meant to be someplace truly dark, as you could see, satellites. And now it's like, No, they're just they're they're just a lot of them there. Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:12] So so like describe the experience then if you're outside, it's a warm summer night. You're lying in the hammock, you're looking up, the sky is clear, the mosquitoes are strangely absent. You are. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:25] Just enjoying going. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:26] To happen. I know, I know, you're just enjoying the night sky. What? And you notice the satellite? What? What will you see in the sky? 

Pamela Gay [00:07:37] In general, most satellites that you're able to see are like some of the fainter stars, and it looks like a tiny star is is moving across the sky. And one of the fascinating things is close to twilight will make it horizon to horizon. But as it gets later and later, you can start to tell when they're entering the shadow of the earth because they'll be going along, going along no more. And and so there's that. First of all, you have to ask yourself, is it a plane? And the speeds and the solidness of the color, or the fact that it's blinking from white to not to white tonight? Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:20] You see the blinking green light, if that's. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:23] An airplane, if it's. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:24] An airplane, any kind of blinking light that tells you this is an airplane. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:29] And with the satellites, it's going to be sunlight getting reflected back to you. So occasionally there'll be a tumbling satellite and I. Those you will see variations in brightness, but it's still the color of the sun light getting reflected back to you the entire time. Now that going across the sky and turning off. One of the fascinating things is if you're out there and you're just taking in the entire sky, you can actually tell the different satellites are at different orbits, because the ones that are in lower orbits will start hitting the shadow earlier than the ones that are in higher orbits. And if something's in a large enough orbit, it's not going to actually land itself into the shadow of the Earth. And so you can continue watching it throughout the night. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:20] Well, that sort of led into what was going to be my next question, which is like, if you are seeing satellites go overhead, what can you learn just by observing? 

Pamela Gay [00:09:31] So a whole lot. The first thing is we make a certain amount of assumption of how big the satellite is based on how much light it's reflecting back. And this isn't perfect. Some satellites are much shinier than others. Something that is covered in solar cells. The solar cells are designed to absorb sunlight, not reflect it. But to a certain degree, based on how bright it is, you can get an estimate of how large it is based on how fast it's moving across the sky. You can start to make assumptions about what orbits and, that can get confirmed again by when it does or doesn't hit the shadow of the earth. And you can tell if it's rotating or not. Assuming it isn't. Symmetric and symmetrically covered in things based on how it varies in brightness as it goes. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:29] Right. So like that varying a brightness. I mean, there are ones that you really need dark skies, but if you're in light polluted territory, like many of the people who are listening to this. Yeah. What can you see? 

Pamela Gay [00:10:45] The International Space Station is only about 400km up and it is pretty darn big. It's something that you can actually resolve into a space station with a middling sized telescope. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:59] Even binoculars. Yeah, with a good pair of binoculars, you can see the little Tie fighter shape to the space station. 

Pamela Gay [00:11:06] So? So the space station's it's big, it's low down. It's reflecting a ton of light. That is something you can see fairly easily. The, Hubble Space Telescope is actually not that hard to see. It's a little bit higher up and a whole lot tinier. But, there are really good predictions for it. And it's it's shiny. It's reflective. Basically. 

Fraser Cain [00:11:29] One of the most exciting things that you can do with this is if, you know, there's a launch of Soyuz or Crew Dragon or, you know, one of these Cygnus capsule, you can go out when the if, if you're lucky and you're going to get the fly over on your territory, you know, then you can look out with binoculars and watch as it flies overhead. And you can see the little dot chasing the big bright dot. You can actually see that the spacecraft is docking in space above your head. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:02] If you are in just the right place, you can get multiple passes in one night, and that allows you to see the dots getting closer and closer, orbit after orbit. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:12] And that's me. So where I live in Canada during the summer, the the sunlight does sort of illuminate the lower the low Earth orbit for the longer time. Yeah. And so I can get three passes of the International Space Station in, in over the course of, of an hour and a half. No, three hours. So you get one and then 90 minutes later you get another 1 in 90 minutes. 45 minutes. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:40] Finish. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:41] Yeah. And then and then you get another one. So you get these three passes and and I've never done, I've never seen it while there's a spacecraft catching it. But it's quite amazing to be able to go outside and and see. So then let's talk about like this is all random happenstance. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:59] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:59] So how do we improve our chances of of spotting a satellite or even certainly find the spotlight as a spotlight and spotting a satellite or finding a specific satellite that we want to see. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:14] What do we do? So the the most straightforward thing to do, and it is designed for absolutely anyone to be able to use it, is to go to the Heavens Above website. And they list prominent well known satellites who tell it where you are. It can tell you when you'll be able to see what passes, and it's really kind of a gateway drug to being a satellite spotter. And it really doesn't get more simple than what Heavens Above allows you to do. Now you can get as trickster as you want, however, and there is satellite. Parsing software in a lot of planetarium software. Now that allows you to go out and you can see what tracks are going ahead as you're looking at your planetarium software, and if you have the right kind of telescope mount, you can chase the suckers down. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:13] Right? Yeah. So yeah, one of my favorite things to do, and I've only and I see that, but I've only done this once successfully. Is you can go to websites that will let you predict the location of the International Space Station for when it's going to pass in front of the sun or the moon. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:31] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:32] And so you go out to the place and it will tell you where you have to be. So it's a very small area nearby you. And so off. It'll recommend some locations you can go within, say 100km. And then you go to this exact location at this exact time, and then you record and a video of the moon. And then you have because because the station can be in shadow and invisible. And so you won't see the space station fly overhead, you just record your image of the moon, and then you go back and you look at the videos that you made and you blow them up and boom, there goes the space station passing in front of the moon at the exact appointed time, which is just incredible. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:15] And there's some folks out there Andrew McCarthy comes to mind who are doing amazing work, getting themselves to the right place and using high end equipment to capture these alignments. And poor Andrew is so good at it that he occasionally gets trolls coming after him, saying that it can't be real and the rate at which things are moving across the moon. Does it make sense? And no, it's just that good. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:43] Yeah, yeah. My my favorite guy named Terry Legault. He's in France. Yeah. And and you could. He's taking pictures that are so good. You can see the astronauts doing a spacewalk on the outside of the International Space Station. Wow. It's crazy. So what about Starlink? Let's say, you know, you've heard that the Starlink speaker trail. How do you see those? 

Pamela Gay [00:16:07] So it depends on on how recently they've launched the. This is going to sound more complicated, but it always, always works. So there are certain websites that you can go to. And they have catalogs of all the satellites that are out there. Celeste Track is one of the ones that that is particularly savvy about having absolutely everything. And NASA provides all the calculators you need to get the observational ephemeris. So you go to Celeste Track, you get what's called a two line element, which is just the way people share satellite information back and forth. It's super compact, not meant for human brains, right? But then JPL has software that will take in these two line elements, turn them into ephemeris, and tell you exactly where in the sky at what time you can find these different objects. A lot of times, amateur astronomers will be out there being like, okay, folks, let's go see this. But there that I have found, there isn't any one place. It's like, okay, type in your location and we will tell you exactly when to see every different Starlink trail. But Sluss track is a good base. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:33] Yeah, yeah. So Let's Track is terrific. I highly recommend it as well. That in heavens above you. Yeah. You need like, you can only see the Starlink for a few days after they launch with your eyes. So they. Yes, they start out with the launch and they start a fairly low altitude. And then they are slowly raising their altitude. And they're in this terrain. And you'll have 60 little dots in this line. And over time they're getting farther and farther apart from each other. And then eventually they all dim as they get higher and they get into their final operational altitude, but also their final orientation. So when they're still raising their altitude, they're they're quite bright and then they fade away. So, you know, people are always worried about whether or not, like, starlings are just going to turn the sky into this grid of little dots. And that is not. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:24] Depends on if you're using a telescope or. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:26] Not. Yeah. No. Well, just look with your eyes like you walk outside, you look up, you won't see any star links. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:31] Yeah. So go to the lost track type in the satellite that you're interested in. Go to JPL horizons. Get the ephemeris. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:40] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:41] And just go chase. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:42] Yeah, yeah. And it is. It is a lot of fun. And this is why I feel this ambivalence. Because, yes, these are human created light pollution that is going across the sky. But it is really cool to see things that human beings have created and to see them in space and to feel this connection that all the way back to Eureka Garden and and Sputnik and the Apollo missions and all this kind of stuff, you're seeing humanity's becoming a spacefaring civilization. Just just like that. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:21] The starlings have an entire story in them, because when those trains get launched, they're they're, as you pointed out, they're launched in the lower orbit. This way, if any of them are dead, they just fall back to Earth. You know, space junk. That is amazing. They then have these ion engines that moves so very slowly tie fighters out at wrong. And and so they're they're slowly, slowly using particles to boost their orbit, which is an entire other story. And so we're seeing things get launched into a safe orbit and then getting moved into a functional orbit where hopefully the atmosphere won't destroy them too often. And that's something neat to get to share with other humans. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:11] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's it's a fun thing to kind of organize like both the space station or the Starlink trails. I mean, I wish there were better tools out there to notify you. There are some for sure. Yeah. Like you can get a notification when the start the space station is going to make a flight overhead. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:27] Yeah. Like the station from NASA is one that helps. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:30] Yeah. And they'll send you like a text message. You've got like the station. It's going to make a fly over your area in ten minutes. Go outside and you're like okay. And then there it is. It's a great party trick. There was an even better party trick, which was the iridium satellites. Did you ever. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:45] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:46] Chase iridium. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:46] Flares. Yes. Those were fabulous. Especially, as you could see them, dawn and dusk occasionally. And there would be this flash brighter than Venus has ever been. If Venus got that bright, we'd be in trouble, and and it would flash and then fade, and. As as the angle that the sunlight was coming at. You changed. The original iridium satellites were problematic, is the word I'm going to choose to use. And and we're not going to go into there abuse of of, bandwidth, but. They were cool had they had this amazingly reflective surface and they'd flare up and fade away. And it wasn't that constant streak. It was this flare that was magnificent. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:40] I would say, you know, when the those that first generation iridium satellites were operating, I would say half of the what did I see in the sky emails that I would guess were explained by iridium satellites. And the thing that's incredible about them is that you could predict when they were going to flare. And so you could say, okay, look over there, get ready. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:00] It was a party trick. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:01] Yeah, there's the flare. And people are like, whoa. So, but the but the net, the first generation network is is long gone. Now satellites are gone. So that party trick is over. Now you've only got the Starlink trails and the International Space Station. All right. So the title of the subject of this episode is How to See Satellites, but also how to avoid them. How do we avoid seeing satellites? 

Pamela Gay [00:22:27] It's it's getting harder and harder. And I, I regret to say that it's starting to become a software problem. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:36] Right. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:37] Yeah. So there are currently satellites crossing the sky in almost every direction, not literally every direction, because going against the rotation of the planet kind of is hard to get into. Even if you have space debris. But, we have polar orbits. We have all manner of inclination between 0 and 90. So you have things going around the equator and around the poles and everywhere in between. Now, luckily, once you start looking away from the equator late at night, the probability you're going to have things, especially in the winter, goes down, down, down. Because, things aren't going to be as much in the sunlight. They're going to be in the shadow of the Earth. And we luckily don't put things in really large, highly inclined orbits. So since they're closer to the planet generally not always there, there's Russian communication satellites and things like that. The Malenko orbits will screw you up, but other than that, so. 

Fraser Cain [00:23:56] So the thing that we mentioned as the way to see satellites go during the time when you're when your nights are the shortest and you're dawn and dusk are the longest to see satellites, so do the opposite and go out at the time when the when the night is the longest and the dawn and the dusk are the shortest, which for us in the northern hemisphere means winter time. You know, December 21st is going to be the, the shortest, the longest night, the shortest day, and and also the coldest. So, so it's sort of bad. But I mean, no matter where you go. 

Pamela Gay [00:24:35] And look away from the equator. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:37] And look away from the equator. So you're so to maximize your chance of not having any satellites in the sky is to see during the winter time on the the the longest night, you can't and then the time. So you most likely see these the satellites at dawn and dusk. So avoid dawn and dusk. Go observe deep into astronomical night. So, like, when would you start? Like if you if you want to guarantee it's it's December 21st and you want to make sure that you don't see any any satellite trails, when would you when would you open up the the light year telescope? 

Pamela Gay [00:25:17] Oh, man. I would want to go as far north as I could while still having good weather in December, which is an interesting set of variables. And. Probably three hours after sunset, so well after astronomical twilight, just because that will get rid of all the lower orbits. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:43] Would get dark for you at night at six, start observing at nine. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:49] Yeah. And it's frustrating. And this is where I think that isn't always going to be practical. We can't throw away that much of the night if we're trying to do science. So what you end up doing is where you might have taken ten images of a target in the past and stacked them together into your image. Now you're going to be taking 13 or 14, so that all those satellite streaks that are cutting through your image are something that you can get rid of. And one of the annoying things is, while all of this works for optical telescopes, infrared telescopes. Are are going to be coerced because infrared. You can still see because the satellites are warm, right? 

Fraser Cain [00:26:39] They're warmed up by the sun. And so they pass through your field of view. And I mean, I think people who are listening to this are burning, like isn't there software that you can use? And the answer is absolutely you can. As an amateur astrophotographer. The problem of removing artifacts from your pictures is is as old as the as the hobby. Yeah. Removing airplane trails, removing satellite trails you throw at the frame that has the picture in it. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:10] You don't even throw out the whole frame. So. So you throw out the pixels. What you do is called min max rejection or and that's just one of the equations. There's lots of different ways, but min max is the easiest one to explain. And it's super effective for this. Basically you say okay, I took 15 images. I am going to get rid of the five brightest no matter what for a given pixel. So you do this on a pixel by pixel basis. I get rid of however many on the low end makes sense for your particular detector. And then I combine everything in the middle. And what this does is it gets rid of your cosmic rays because they're going to vary from pixel to pixel. Each time it gets rid of your satellites. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:52] There are cosmic rays going through your picture anyway. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:56] Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:56] So cool. But yeah. But also they're annoying. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:59] They're super annoying. Especially the glancing blow ones because, yeah, they look more like lightning. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:05] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:07] So yeah. Min max rejection. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:09] Right? Right. So. So the point is, algorithmically, you can run your astrophotography through these algorithms. You can remove the star trails, the plane trails, if that's what you want, or make a fun picture that shows all of the trails all the same time to leave, you know, leave those in and you can see just how much they're crossing your pictures. It is it is a minor annoyance and it's getting a little bit worse, but it is not causing a lot of damage to the work of Astrophotographers. But the where the area is significant is in the for the work of actual professional astronomers. And yeah, you know, you have limited time on the on this really powerful telescope. You're taking a picture of this specific galaxy. You need a very, you know, very long exposure image to get the spectroscopic data. You look you you you were only able to take ten images of the galaxy, and one of them has a giant satellite trail going right through it. It you have throw it out. It's worthless. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:13] There are maths that are saying that it's going to increase the amount of observing time needed on a target from several percent to 10% ish. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:26] Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:27] And that's a lot that that means potentially several percent to 10% less science completed. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:35] Right. And the halfway solution is back to the thing you mentioned earlier on, which is ephemeris. Like right now, there's no rules and regulations about launching the satellites as with respect to astronomers. And there's no requirement for the satellite operators to tell astronomers where their satellites are so that they can organize their observations around it. There was a paper that I read where they said that you could remove almost all of the effect of the satellite of the satellites in astronomical images from, from a trailing standpoint, not the sky. So that's a whole other issue by providing really accurate locations and orbits of the satellite. And so the astronomer knows, okay, don't take the picture for one second, wait one second before taking the picture, and the satellite will have moved away from the object that I'm observing. And then take the picture. 

Pamela Gay [00:30:35] And it's it's going to become a hot mess at some point where you have algorithms set up. So, you know, I can do 90s pause, do 100 and 20s pause. And so you're trying to. Figure it out. 

Fraser Cain [00:30:56] Yeah. And look, the satellite and this is this is my. You know, people always have this. What I think is a fairly emotional reaction to the existence of the satellite and, and for me, like, the thing that should have happened was the satellite operators and the astronomers got together and they came up with a set of rules for how to minimize the impact on science. And that conversation was never had. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:22] No. 

Fraser Cain [00:31:23] End. And the astronomers could have had a voice and could have had these, could have put in a bunch of recommendations that the government could have then made the satellite operators adhere to, and we would be in a place where we would still have almost the same amount of high speed communications around the Earth, and the astronomers would be able to get almost the same amount of the science that they're doing today. And and that ever happened, which makes me frustrated. 

Pamela Gay [00:31:52] Yeah, we were both at the 2020 meeting, which was right after Starlink had started putting up trains. And the outrage was palpable because we just didn't see it coming. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:06] And yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:08] Radio astronomy has has worked hard to try and get service providers to shut off their, broadcasts well over various radio sites, radio astronomy sites. But with optical telescopes, we can't turn off the sun's reflection as readily. Right. So we're kind of stuck. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:32] Yeah, yeah, 100%. Anyway, it's a you know, obviously it's an ongoing issue and I'm sure we'll be reporting on it when we get to the final 30,000 satellites in various constellations and so on. Like it will be an unfolding issue. But there is no putting this horse back in the barn. 

Pamela Gay [00:32:51] Genie, back in the. 

Fraser Cain [00:32:52] Back in the bottle. We are we are proceeding into this new world with tens of thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites, at the same time trying to do science from the ground. Yeah. Thank you, Pamela. 

Pamela Gay [00:33:04] And thank you, Fraser, and thank you so much to everyone out in our audience who supports us through Patreon. I wish we could thank all of you, but we can't. But this week I'm going to thank at least some of you. So thank you to Scott Cohn, Kimberly, Kimberly Riach, Daniel Loosely, Marco Irsay, Matthew horstman DFM, Jeff Wilson, Gregory singleton, Philip Walker, Tim garage, Matthias Hayden, Claudia mastroianni, Justin Proctor, Tim mcmeekin, Cancellara. Kim. Glencoe. Disaster. Gina. Cooper. Veronica. Cure, Benjamin. Mueller, Omar. Del. Riviera. Jay. Alex. Alex. Anderson, Aaron. Zegras, Kenneth. Ryan, Don. Mendez, Michelle. Cullen, Dean. McDaniel, Paul. De. Disney, Scott. Briggs, Ninja neck. Share some, Michael Regan, Peter Matt Rucker, Jim McGeehan, Frodo. Tannenbaum, father Prax, Brant. Crump, Philip Grand and a saurus. Bruce. Amazon, Mark. Steven. Resnick, Abraham. Cottrell, Dwight and Semansky. Thank you all. 

Fraser Cain [00:34:22] Thanks, everyone. See you next week. 
Pamela Gay [00:34:24] See you. Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today's show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.

We generally save our stargazing suggestions for the summer, when it’s warmer in the northern hemisphere. But you’re tough, you can handle a little cold. And it’s worth it because there are some wonderful things you can see in the night sky this time of year.

Show Notes | Transcript

Mars Mesmerizes at Opposition (Sky & Telescope)

The Mars Rovers (NASA)

Mission Juno (SwRI)

JunoCam : Processing (SwRI)

Rosalind Franklin: Europe's delayed Mars rover to receive rescue package (BBC News)

Europe’s first Mars rover mission saved by major investment (Nature)

Mars-Moon Occultation 2022 Archives (Sky & Telescope)

Moon and Mars! Fav photos of December 7 (EarthSky)

Geminid meteor shower 2022 (In-the-sky.org)

Heavens-Above

International Space Station (NASA)

Starlink

Bolide (Swinburne University)

What Is an Aurora? (NASA)

Solar Cycle 25 Is Here. NASA, NOAA Scientists Explain What That Means (NASA)

Solar Cycle Progression (NOAA / NWS)

Sunspots and Solar Flares (NASA)

Citizen Scientists Help Discover A New Feature of STEVE (NASA)

SpaceWeather.com

Orion the Hunter, the world’s most recognizable constellation (EarthSky)

The Orion Nebula is a starry nursery (EarthSky)

Star Formation (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian)

Andromeda galaxy: All you need to know (EarthSky)

Double Cluster in Perseus on October evenings (EarthSky)

Triangulum galaxy, the 2nd-closest spiral galaxy (EarthSky)

Pleiades: The Seven Sisters Star Cluster (NASA)

Hyades star cluster: face of the Bull (EarthSky)

Betelgeuse is Dimming . . . Why? (Sky & Telescope)

Image of Betelgeuse’s surface taken in March 2020 (ESA)

See all 5 bright planets in December 2022 (EarthSky)

Stargazing with Early Astronomer Galileo Galilei (Sky & Telescope)

Comet 2022 E3 now in morning skies, brightening (EarthSky)

Comet C/2022 L2 (ATLAS) (TheSkyLive)

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Transcriptions provided by GMR Transcription Services

Fraser: AstronomyCast Episode 663, “The End-of-the-Year Events.” Welcome to AstronomyCast, your weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Gay: I am doing well, how are you?

Fraser: Good, good. I could whine about weather, but I won’t.

Dr. Gay: Are you going to have a white Christmas?

Fraser: Probably, yeah. We’re gonna have a white December, just all the way through. Last year was bonkers. This year is shaping up to be just this side of weird, but now, I just feel like every year, the weather is just weird. That’s just the new normal.

Dr. Gay: I saw blue jays.

Fraser: You saw blue jays?

Dr. Gay: I saw blue jays. Blue jays mean winter, robins mean summer, so it’s going to be a cold one when the blue jays are here.

Fraser: Right. Now, we generally save our stargazing selections for the summer, when it’s warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, but you’re tough, you can handle a little cold, and it’s worth it because there are some wonderful things you can see in the night sky this time of year. Have we ever done this? I was sort of thinking about this. I was writing my introduction, I’m like, yeah, every year, every couple of years, our last episode before we go on hiatus, we give you a bunch of recommendations to see over the summer, and we drag out all the common things, but we don’t do one this time of year, and that’s crazy because –

Dr. Gay: Yes!

Fraser: – there’s a ton of really interesting things, especially this year –

Dr. Gay: Yes.

Fraser: – that we should highlight, and so, you know what? I think our listeners are tough. They can handle it. They can handle some cold outside weather when they just take some extra hot chocolate and just warm with layers –

Dr. Gay: Or extreme heat, if they’re in Australia.

Fraser: Right, exactly. Are we avoiding the extreme heat? It’s milder, cooler, and nicer in July in Australia as well. So, what interesting event is coming up – let’s talk about some transitory events, some things that are brand-new and fresh, and then maybe we can shift over to some stuff that you can expect to see every year around this time. So, what is interesting that’s gonna be happening this winter?

Dr. Gay: Well, right now, we have Mars at opposition, which means that Mars is rising a little bit after sunset, the nights are quite long, so Mars is rising a little bit after sunset, it’s setting a little bit before sunrise, and it’s pretty much at its highest point in the sky at the middle of the night, which, time zone dependent, may or may not be midnight where you are, but this means that that giant red dot in the sky could be Antares, could be Betelgeuse, or could be Mars.

Fraser: If you go outside right now and you live in very light-polluted skies, you will probably see two stars, Jupiter and Mars, right? Neither of them are stars, but they are the two brightest objects in the sky right now, after the Moon, and it’s a good way to know if you can see clear sky and you can see these two objects – yeah, you’re looking at Jupiter and Mars. It’s amazing.

Dr. Gay: Yes. And, it’s fun to be able to say to people, “Hey, did you know there’s a world entirely occupied by a troop of robots,” make it sound as spectacular as possible, “The Cylons have arrived,” and it’s just Mars, and you can then continue the story, pointing out at Jupiter and saying, “Hey, there’s this little mission called Juno going around Jupiter, and they post all their information online, so when we go in to warm up, we can download some data and make beautiful images using a camera that NASA purchased.”

Fraser: So, why is Mars opposition so important? What does it mean?

Dr. Gay: Mars opposition means that it is a reasonably good time to launch a spacecraft, and it also means that it’s easy to monitor it. So, if you want to do something where you want quick turnaround time between you and your favorite robot, you aim to have that thing occur during opposition, and if you are aiming to launch a mission toward the Red Planet, you aim to launch it about now.

Fraser: And this is something that is transitory – Mars opposition happens at different times of the year – and when you imagine it in your mind, just imagine you’ve got the Sun, and then you’ve got the Earth, and then you’ve got Mars all lined up.

Dr. Gay: Yes.

Fraser: That’s opposition. And so, Mars is opposite to the Sun.

Dr. Gay: And you don’t want to launch precisely at opposition. The Rosalind Franklin rover missed its launch window, which was a little bit earlier in the year, but when you see Mars at opposition, it usually means, hey, a launch window may have just gone by.

Fraser: Yeah. And typically, a fleet of spacecraft launch every Mars opposition year, but not this year. I don’t think anything’s gone to Mars this year.

Dr. Gay: No.

Fraser: Rosalind Franklin was supposed to, but, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine canceled that because they were going to be providing the launching. I don’t think there’s anything left. China hasn’t got one, UAE – I don’t think anybody’s launching this year.

Dr. Gay: And not every opposition is made equal, not every launch window is made equal, so, by definition, you will end up with an opposition every single Earth year, but you don’t get an ideal launch window every single year.

Fraser: And when we’re recording this, Mars is going to be passing behind the Moon. You’re going to get an occultation, but that’s going to be happening tonight –

Dr. Gay: Yes, go look for images!

Fraser: Yeah, go look for pictures and videos from people who took it, because it happened, but I’ve got cloudy skies, so I won’t be able to see it tonight –

Dr. Gay: I have clouds.

Fraser: – but I’ll have to live vicariously through everybody who took pictures and took video of it. So, that’s Mars. What else is happening in the sky?

Dr. Gay: So, we have Mars, we have Jupiter, we have – the Geminid meteor shower is going to be peaking the week of December 12th, and all because it’s peaking on its normal December teen date, depending on which year you’re listening to this, that doesn’t mean that if you missed the peak night, you shouldn’t go looking for meteorites anyways. The radiant is coming out of the constellation of Gemini, so you’ll see the meteors appear to radiate out in straight lines away from that constellation statistically more often. You’re going to see shooting stars all over the sky, and you’re also going to see shooting satellites, except they’re on known orbits, and it’s much less random.

So, don’t be afraid to go check out Heavens Above and find out is there going to be an International Space Station pass tonight, is one of the brand-new, super bright satellite communication satellites going over tonight, is there a Starlink train tonight. All of these things are a good excuse to get your family outside and talking about something different than what the dog just did, I don’t know.

Fraser: Yeah, the Geminid meteor shower is the best – typically, it is the most reliable high-volume meteor shower every year. You typically can get upwards of a hundred meteors per hour, so, a little more than one a minute when you’re watching the sky, which is better than the Perseids. We always rave about the Perseids, but the Geminids are better than the Perseids.

Dr. Gay: Perseids get more bolides.

Fraser: Right. There are definitely some – there’s a few weird ones that can give you more bolides, but the Geminids, for raw meteor power, you can’t go wrong. It’s just for me, and probably for you, it’s cold, so you have to pace yourself when you’re outside in that kind of weather, but if you want guaranteed meteor sightings, the Geminid meteor. Unfortunately, we’re not going to have the best Moon this year for the Geminids.

Dr. Gay: No. If you go out closer to Christmas than to that December…roughly 13th peak, you’re going to have the Moon later and later in the evening and a smaller and smaller fraction of it, so that is at least working in your favor, but yeah, you want as little Moon as possible when you’re looking for shooting stars. And, aurorae – that’s something else you can pay attention to this year, or any year, for that matter.

Fraser: All right, let’s talk about auroras then, because this is maybe not going to be the best year, but we’re on our way to better and better years. Why is that?

Dr. Gay: So, we are headed towards solar maximum. In just a few years, our sun’s north and south magnetic poles are going to work on flipping themselves, and, in the process, create a maximum number of sunspots on the surface of the sun that we can observe during the day, and periodically, the loops of magnetic field lines that you end up spiraling over the surface of the planet can snap and rearrange themselves and, in the process, send a whole bunch of charged particles our direction, and when those charge particles interact with our planet’s magnetic field, they streak down in collections, and as they interact with particles in the atmosphere, we will see amazing green and red streaks, a cool additional friend called STEVE that looks like a picket fence in the sky – it’s just an absolutely beautiful thing.

It tends to be maximum in likelihood that you’re going to see an awesome show in the sky closer to the equinoxes, but winter lights are long, winter nights can be dark, and check out SpaceWeather.com to find out how to sign up for alerts and see what auroral activity is predicted for your area of the planet.

Fraser: And I go on and on about this, but I really think it’s important. For a lot of people who are listening to this, they’ve never seen an aurora in their life, and you think that you never can, that you’ve gotta go to Iceland or Alaska, but you actually don’t. As long as you live in the northern part of the United States, in the middle of Europe, Japan, in southern Australia and New Zealand, the southern part of South America, you can see an aurora. You just need to be more organized. If you live in Iceland, you walk outside to walk your dog, and you look up, and whoa, what a surprise, another aurora blowing your mind, but for the rest of us –

Dr. Gay: New Hampshire.

Fraser: Yeah, the rest of us, who live further away from the poles, you just have to be organized about this. So, what I recommend – and I recommend this every year – is find an aurora alert app, and I apologize, I can’t give you a specific recommendation because these things change all the time.

Sometimes they’re great, and then they go offline, and so, just do a search in the app store for “aurora alert app,” look for websites – just google it, you can find it – and it will tell you when the space weather strength is growing to the point that you could have auroras in your area, and you need to learn what that’s gonna be. For me, I need a certain strength – I think it’s, like, six, five, and I’ll be able to see auroras – and you also wanna find a place that gives you a nice view to the north or, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, to the south.

So, for me, for example, I’ve got a beach that is here on Vancouver Island that I can stand on and that I can watch straight to the north. I look all the way across this giant gap in the water, and then there’s mountains to the north, and so, I’ve got a really nice view to the horizon, it’s very dark skies, the city lights are behind me.

And every time the aurora alert goes off, we pack up all our stuff, and we go down to the beach, and we wait, and sometimes you just take some pictures and you maybe can see a glow off on the horizon, and other times, the sky explodes with aurora activity, and yet, I’ve never just gone outside, looked up while I’m walking the dog, and thought, “Wow, aurora!” Each one has required preparation, but you miss 100% of the auroras that you don’t try to go see.

So, this is your year, and as we approach the solar maximum, they’re just gonna get stronger and better, and you’re gonna have better and better chances to see this. So, please, I beg you, install an aurora alert app, get to know what strong space weather events look like in your area, plan out a place that you can try to view them, and when one of these storms is building, go to your dark sky spot and see what you can see. Take a camera, do some long exposures, and I’ll bet you’ll even get them. So, good luck. I believe in you.

Dr. Gay: And this is gonna sound so lame, but my recommendation is if you have a friend with a farmhouse surrounded by pasture that has an attic, figure out how to get the north-facing window open, because then you can keep your body inside and your camera pointed outside, and that is honestly one of my favorite ways to do star trail images, is just straight out an attic window.

Fraser: Awesome. All right, we’ve talked about Mars, we’ve talked about the meteor shower, we’ve talked about auroras. What else should people be looking for this winter?

Dr. Gay: So, one of the cool things that you can do in the December/January timeframe is go outside – and this is an early-in-the-evening thing – and find the constellation Orion. You don’t need someplace that is particularly dark. We can just make it out from Cambridge, Massachusetts, couldn’t make it out from downtown Boston, so it can just be that small of a variation.

Fraser: Orion? You can see Orion anywhere, pretty much.

Dr. Gay: From downtown under skyscrapers, not necessarily.

Fraser: Right, okay. What a nightmare.

Dr. Gay: But yeah, you can see it just about everywhere, but literally not in the financial district. That is my requirement. And, underneath that belt of Orion is the sword, and you probably won’t be able to make out the Orion Nebula if you’re in a bright place, but you can point out to people “That constellation you’re looking at – that entire region of the sky is actively forming stars,” and if you’re someplace darker, you’re like, “Okay, so, that smudge in the sword – that is a star-forming area that is in the process this very moment of creating new stars.”

Fraser: I love that process. Even if you don’t know your way around the night sky, if you’ve got a pair of binoculars, you can just look around the sky with your eyes, look for anything that’s like a little hazy, blobby, fuzzy bit in the sky, and then you point your binoculars at that thing, and it’s a thing! You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, you can see the double cluster in Perseus, you can see the Orion Nebula, you can see the Triangulum Galaxy.

There’s a ton of things that you can actually see that you don’t realize that these are objects in the night sky, and then you point your binoculars at them, and you’re like, “Oh yeah, there it is!” Even with regular binoculars, you look at the Orion Nebula, you totally see where it is.

Fraser: And what I love about that area of the sky is you then jump from the Orion Nebula to the Pleiades, which looks like someone dipped a cotton ball in white paint and then splooged it onto the sky, and now you’re seeing a system that just finished forming stars that is still blowing the gas and dust out of the star-forming region, and as you bump over to Taurus, which is right next to Orion, you now have the Hyades Cluster, and that’s an open cluster that is in the process of falling apart as the rotation of our galaxy causes some stars to lag behind and others to race ahead.

So, we have, in this area of the sky that you can block with your hands, a system that’s in the process of still forming, a system that’s getting rid of its last remnant gas and dust, and that system that’s falling apart, and there’s a story there where you can explain, “This is how astronomers understand how stars form and why the Sun is alone.”

Fraser: Yeah, I love that. These are baby, baby stars, everything’s shrouded in gas and dust, and stars are just going off supernova in this, and then, here’s an older one where the stars have mostly blown off the surrounding gas, and they’re starting to clear out their environment, and then, with Taurus, they’ve cleared out their environment, and now they’re drifting away from each other and will be lost in the chaos of the Milky Way.

Dr. Gay: And then, you can always just point out that someday, hopefully in the next 100,000 years or so, when humans are still hopefully around, Orion the Hunter will get a bloody red shoulder when Betelgeuse decides to explode.

Fraser: Right, right. And, even Betelgeuse – I think right now, it’s brighter than usual, the time that we’re recording this –

Dr. Gay: Yes.

Fraser: – but the variations on Betelgeuse are actually fairly visible, and you can use the other bright stars in Orion to give you a sense of whether it is brighter or dimmer than these other stars. So, back when Betelgeuse dimmed several years ago, it was clearly obvious. You walked outside, and you were like, “Weird, Betelgeuse is dim.”

And so, you can do this. You can actually just visually compare them and go, “Okay, Betelgeuse is a little brighter than Rigel or a little less bright than Rigel,” and just compare them, and – just walk outside and compare the stars, and after a while, you’ll build up a sense – you’re actually watching the variations on Betelgeuse, and those variations are coming from enormous sunspots that can cover a huge portion of the surface of the star, of burps of gas and dust that are being blobbed out into space and blocking our view to the star. You can make these observations for yourself. It’s amazing.

Dr. Gay: And this is a system where, when you go back inside to warm up again, we have actually imaged – in kind of low resolution, but we have imaged the surface of Betelgeuse with interferometers here on the surface of our planet, so this is our one chance to really make out what another star looks like in a similar way to how we look at how our own star, the Sun, looks like.

Fraser: Now, you mentioned briefly that Mars is in the sky, and I talked about how Jupiter is in the sky, but actually, all the planets are in the sky right now.

Dr. Gay: It’s true. Not all of them are easy to see.

Fraser: Right, especially if you don’t have a nice view to the horizon, but over December 2022, just in case you’re listening to this into the far, far future, it’s possible to see all of the visible planets at various times in the sky. So, you can see Mercury close to the horizon – I don’t know whether it’s after sunset or before sunrise –

Dr. Gay: It switches. Depending on when you listen, it will be different.

Fraser: It switches, yeah. You can see Venus, you can see Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and they’re all visible in the sky right now.

Dr. Gay: And two super cool things to note is Venus has phases the same way the Moon has phases, and with a modest-sized telescope, you can start to see, oh, that’s a crescent Venus, that is a waxing gibbous Venus. It has all these phases. And then, the other thing that it’s fun to surprise people with, but you have to plan ahead because you’re not gonna randomly figure this out – you can see Neptune with a small telescope. Galileo saw Neptune, he just didn’t know he saw Neptune. It was in the field of view of Jupiter, and he sketched it out.

Fraser: That’s cool.

Dr. Gay: Yeah. You can see Uranus with a modest telescope.

Fraser: That’s amazing. So, were there any other events that you think people should be aware of this winter?

Dr. Gay: Those are the big ones that are easy to explain. There is a comet that has been spotted that is coming in, it’s slowly approaching roughly the northern celestial pole, Polaris, in the sky, it’s going to dive through our solar system, and it already has a little tiny tail and a bit of a coma, and so, there are hints that we’re going to have a good comet this year, hopefully.

Fraser: Perfect. Let’s hope so. This is it – 2023, this is it. This is a portent of a good year for astronomy. All right, thanks, Pam.

Dr. Gay: Thank you so much, Fraser, and thank you so much to all of our patrons out there. Without you, we would not have editors to go back and fix it when I inadvertently rename planets, and we otherwise just have barking dogs and things like that. Because of you, we are able to pay fair wages and provide insurance, where needed, to our staff.

And this week, I would like to thank Benjamin Mueller, Scott Briggs, Don Mundis, Dean McDaniel, Micheal Regan, Omar Del Rivero, Matt Rucker, Janelle, Michelle Cullen, J. Alex Anderson, schercm, Peter, Benjamin Carryer, Frode Tennebaum¸, Moose and Deer, Anitusar, Bruce Amazeen, Jim McGihon, Abraham Cottrill, Philip Grand, Father Prax, Mark Steven Rasnake, Camy Raissian, Dustin Ruoff, Brent Kreinop, Dwight Illk, Gfour184, Cemanski, Alex Raine, Andrew Stephenson, Gabriel Gauffin, James Rodger, Paul Hayden, Glenn McDavid, John Aliseth, Benjamin Davies, Sean Martz, The Air Major, Sam Brooks and his Mom, Karthik Venkatraman, The Lonely Sand Person, The Mysterious Mark, Bart Flaherty, Dean, Naila, Brian Kilby, Nate Detwiler, Arcticfox, John Drake, Lew Zealand, Corinne Dmitruk, Ganesh Swaminathan, Bob Zatzke, Ron Thorrsen, Jordan Turner, Leigh Harborne, Jason Kardokus, Robert Hundl, Kim Barron, Frank Stuart, planetar, Steven Coffey, Ruben McCarthy, Arthur Latz-Hall, Paul Esposito, Timelord Iroh, Daniel Donaldson, Ian Abdilla, and Geoff MacDonald. Thank you all so much. You are the people that make what we do possible.

Fraser: Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next week.

Dr. Gay: Bye-bye.

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Light pollution is a big problem, and it’s only getting worse -- not just near cities but everywhere thanks to increased satellite constellations. How bad is the problem, and how can we fix it?

Show Notes | Transcript

Universe Today (Patreon)

Universe Today

CosmoQuest (Patreon)

Find Your Night Sky Brightness on the Bortle Scale (Astro Backyard)

Starlink satellites can look like a plume or train of light (EarthSky)

Light pollution map

Light Pollution Map (Dark Site Finder)

One-Third of Humanity Can't See the Milky Way (Astronomy)

Up with People

International Space Station (NASA)

Spot the Station (NASA)

United Nations

IAU

International Dark-Sky Association

UNESCO World Heritage Centre - World Heritage List (UNESCO)

Saving the night sky: New Zealand's craziest experiment yet? (BBC Travel)

Aoraki Mackenzie (New Zealand) (IDSA)

Here’s why hut-hiking is the best way to see New Zealand (National Geographic)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Warner Bros.)

NIGHTS OVER TUCSON: How the Tucson, Arizona, LED Conversion Improved the Quality of the Night (IDSA)

Bright LEDs could spell the end of dark skies https://www.energy.gov/eere/ssl/potential-impacts-led-street-lighting-sky-glow (MIT)

LED streetlights are increasing blue-light pollution in Europe (Physics World)

Starlink

Amazon reserves up to 83 launches for Project Kuiper satellites (GeekWire)

Starlink Satellites Are Fainter Now — But Still Visible (Sky & Telescope)

Apparent Magnitude (Swinburne University)

Skyglow (Wikipedia)

Coruscant (Wookiepedia)

Star Trek

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Transcriptions provided by GMR Transcription Services

Fraser: Astronomy Cast, Episode 659 “Clear Skies and Bright Satellites”. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today. I have been a space and astronomy journalist for over 20 years. And with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey, Pamela. How are you doing?

Dr. Gay: I am doing well. I want to apologize to our audience if today’s quality isn't what you are used to. One of our team members, Annie Wilson, is getting married this week and all of us are in Vegas to celebrate. So, I’m coming to you from hotel internet, which is not the best. But the show will go on.

Fraser: So, you might not know but every time a person signs up as a patron to Universe Today, I send them an email asking them to do an interview with me. And it’s actually talking to me like we’re at a Zoom meeting and I’m asking you a bunch of questions about where you found Universe Today and so on. And I would say about half of the people first found out about Universe Today through Astronomy Cast. 

Dr. Gay: Wow.

Fraser: So, for those of you who have sort of followed this journey from Astronomy Cast to Universe Today, thank you. I really appreciate it. For those of you who don’t realize, it’s so funny. Every episode I go, “I’m the publisher of Universe Today.” And people are like, “I didn’t realize that you did Universe Today or what this Universe Today thing was.” So, maybe I need to say, “Universe Today” 10 times a show or something. I don’t know. But it’s been very interesting to have this conversation with people. So, just a secret bonus if you didn’t know, if you sign up for my Patreon over at patreon.com/universetoday, I will ask you to talk to me. And it will actually be me and we will actually talk.

Dr. Gay: That's amazing.

Fraser: Right. 

Dr. Gay: I need to start doing that for CosmoQuest, I think. That’s amazing. I –

Fraser: It is so much fun.

Dr. Gay: – love that idea.

Fraser: It’s so much fun. And after you see all these trolls, all these nasty people out there on the internet, people yelling and fighting each other, and you just get like 15 minutes of pure bliss talking to people about interesting things. And it just restores your faith in humanity. Anyone who does run a Patreon, talk to your fans. It’s so much fun. Now, light pollution is a big problem and it’s only getting worse; not just your cities, but everywhere thanks to increased satellite constellations. How bad is the problem and how can we fix it? So, you're right now traveling. You're in Las Vegas. What Bortle number would you give the place?

Dr. Gay: Oh, man. How bad does it go? It’s not quite Times Square or that intersection in Tokyo with the crazy crosswalks, but there's not a lot of stars up there or planets. It’s just kind of a few things. And for better or worse, unless there's a Starlink train going over where I am right now, you're not even gonna see the satellites because of all those lights pointed up on the buildings, pointed down on the ground that are scattering into the sky.

Fraser: And actually, Vegas is an island of light pollution in an ocean of pretty dark skies in the West side of the United States. Like, if you look at a map of the light pollution in the U.S., there is this clear line between the West and the East. The East is a nightmare. It’s funny. So, I talk to people about how to find dark skies, and so I pull of the dark sky finder map which overlays light pollution on top of Google Maps. And you can sort of zip around and look at various places, and I’m looking for stuff that is green. The best you can have is black. Then, after that is blue, and then green. Green lets you see the Milky Way. If you're in green, you can see the Milky Way.

                                    And for people on the West side, it’s easy. You just go in any direction for about 10 minutes and you should be able to see the Milky Way. For people in the East, it can be an hour to get somewhere, two hours to get somewhere where they can actually see the Milky Way. And for people in Europe there's nowhere you can go. Get on a boat and –

Dr. Gay: Oh, you can’t really. In Portugal, there's this dark sky site. In Spain, there's a dark sky site. But they're not dark the way we’re used to dark here.

Fraser: And so, if you're in, say, the Netherlands, I don’t know. The Alps? There's just nowhere to go. It’s terrifying. And I think a third of humanity now can’t see the Milky Way.

Dr. Gay: What is the darkest place you think you’ve ever been?

Fraser: Australia, no question. By far. Hands down.

Dr. Gay: For me, and this is so bitter sweet in these times that we live in, back when I was in high school, I was in the People-to-People Youth Exchange. And a whole group of us astronomy nerds went to U.S.S.R to be at an exchange at their six-meter telescope, which at the time was the largest in the world. And as part of the exchange, they took us camping up on the glacier, or near a glacier. We were in the rock field at the base of the glacier.

Fraser: Wow. 

Dr. Gay: And being a moody, slightly-goth-in-my-head-but-never-had-the-willpower-to-do-the-makeup kid, I decided one night I was going to go off by myself and sit on a rock and just stare at the stars. And that was the first time in my life I’d ever seen a satellite. And to me, it was this magical moment of figuring out “Wait, that moving thing is not an airplane,” and just folding into the sky and seeing all these things I’d never seen before; being completely lost because there were too many stars for me to easily find my way around. And I’d grown up desperately trying to find Andromeda from my driveway in New England and that was not a thing that I ever succeeded at. To go from that to this dark satellite was amazing.

Fraser: So, growing up, there had always been satellites overhead and my dad would teach me to find them as we’d go out at night. And I guess being in Canada, we’re farther north and so when we’re in the summer in Canada, then the satellites are in sunlight for longer than they would be for more southern latitudes. And so, during the summer you can be sitting out in the warm evening and just watch these satellites go overhead. We can get three passes of the International Space Station in the summer 90 minutes apart, separated –

Dr. Gay: Wow.

Fraser: – in different spots in the sky. And we definitely get Starlink trains as they're going by. So, I think this idea of dark skies and the light pollution, it's been around for a long time. It’s been around for probably 50, 75 years. It’s been around for a long time and it’s just been getting worse and worse. What is the state of light pollution today?

Dr. Gay: There are United Nations committees working in concert with the International Astronomical Union and the International Dark Skies Association, IDA, to try and identify places in all the nations of the world. And they're not gonna succeed in all the nations, but trying to find places where the skies still allow you to see Andromeda with your unaided eye, still allow you to make out Messier objects easily, and take those sites with a visual magnitude of getting down to six if your eyes are good, seven if you're a crazy eye person. Some people can do that. I learned that and it was shocking. 

                                    They're trying to find those places and turn them not just into national parks but into internationally recognized dark sites, the same way we have UNESCO historical sites. Now, we’re starting to have essentially the equivalent for dark places. And this is in recognition of if we don’t set aside the places that are dark, we’re gonna lose them forever; the same way one might once have set aside national parks to be preserves of animals, now we’re preserving the sky as well as the landscape.

Fraser: I don't know if you had heard the news but New Zealand is thinking of trying to make the whole country a dark-sky preserve.

Dr. Gay: That would be amazing. There's already a dark site not too far away from Christchurch. And I haven't been to that half of New Zealand, but there are more sheep by orders of magnitude in New Zealand than humans and it is a place that celebrates its countryside. You can actually hike all the way from the southernmost tip of the islands, take a ferry to get between the two islands, and then walk the rest of the way with little cabins for hikers all along the way. It is designed to allow people to celebrate the landscape, which is why Lord of the Rings could so successfully be filmed there. 

                                    And it’s easy to preserve the sky if you don’t have a lot of people and you say, “Okay, when the people do start encroaching on this land, we’re going to require that constructions of new properties be built in such a way that we’re not taking away from our ability to see this sky.

Fraser: There are some places that are demonstrating that this is completely feasible. You look at Tucson, Arizona, which is near a lot of the observatories, and the whole place is designed with a respect for the night sky. The lights point down; they're dimmish, and any excessive lights being sent up into the sky is discouraged. And you can still get around at night in Tucson, and yet you have these skies that let you see the Milky Way pretty much when you're in any part of the city. And so, it’s not impossible. And I think we expected that, as the new revolution in the LED lights came out, their lower power but same amount of light, plus their ability to be pointed a lot better, would turn the tide of light pollution. 

                                    But it didn't happen. If anything, it got worse. They just said, “Okay. Well, with more power we can put out more light, so let’s put out more light.” So, they swapped out dimmer light fixtures with brighter light fixtures. So, actually the light pollution problem is getting a lot worse in a lot of cities. 

Dr. Gay: And bluer. That is an unexpected outcome because different colors of light reflect in different ways, scatter in different ways. And as many of us have encountered it’s super easy to get a bunch of super-bright, on-the-blue-side-of-the-spectrum LED lights and just create motion sensors and floodlights. And I know that I currently have six extremely bright LED lights with solar panels on them in my front yard because they were pointed at Halloween decorations. Now, they will eventually come down. Although, we’ve decided the skeleton in the tree is gonna get a Santa hat and he stays there. But when you get to the –

Fraser: Right.

Dr. Gay: – point that you can get a solar-powered, very blue LED light, you can no longer make energy arguments.

Fraser: Right, right. So, let’s talk about the satellite problem. And obviously, at this point, there are various companies, especially SpaceX with Starlink, they're adding hundreds if not thousands of satellites every year. We’re up to, I think, like 3,000, almost 4,000 Starlinks and they're planning to get to 42,000 satellites. Amazon is planning to do its version. So, what impact are these satellite networks going to have on light pollution?

Dr. Gay: What we’re running into is these satellites are typically in low Earth orbit so that you can have low latency connections. Not that this particular connection feels all that low latency.

Fraser: Right. I’m on Starlink right now.

Dr. Gay: And I’m on hotel, so I have no idea what it’s using. But these low latency connections require satellites that are closer to the planet, and because they're closer to the planet they're able to appear brighter. So, what's happening is, when light hits a surface, if it’s a perfectly smooth surface, the angle that the light comes in equals the angle that the light comes out. And in that scenario, you end up with super-bright satellites because the light can get beamed back. Now, luckily, perfectly reflected surfaces aren’t really a thing. So, in general what we’re looking at is sunlight hits a satellite, scatters out in all directions due to the roughness of the surface, and then we have a one-over-distance-squared relationship between us and how bright that satellite appears. 

                                    Now, if something gets fainter as the square of the distance, if you double the distance, it’s going to be four times fainter. Now, on the other side, if you bring it closer it's gonna be all that much more bright. All these satellites in low Earth orbit are substantially brighter than the ones that are in geosynchronous orbit many, many, many times higher up.

Fraser: Right, right. 

Dr. Gay: So, there's that factor.

Fraser: There was some interesting research that I was looking into. Astronomers have been very carefully measuring the brightness of the Starlinks and without any kind of brightness mitigation features. They're about 6.5 magnitude; so, beyond the ability of most people, even in the darkest skies, to be able to see –

Dr. Gay: Once they get to their final orbit.

Fraser: – once they get to their final orbit. When they're going up there in a train, they're very bright and many people have seen that. Once they get to their final orbit, they're essentially impossible to see with the unaided eye. There's the VISORSat version which it looks like they've abandoned which get it even darker; I think it’s like magnitude 7.5, which is beyond the eyesight of anybody. There's also ones they painted, which are like 6.8, something like that. So, they're all in the 6.5 to 7.5 magnitude range which you need a pair of binoculars to be able to see them. And so, I think that great worry that you would stand outside and you would see this grid of satellites orbiting around planet Earth all the time wasn't warranted. 

                                    But there absolutely has been an impact on astronomy, or it is beginning now and we’re starting to really recognize what the true ramifications of this are. What's the impact?

Dr. Gay: What we’re seeing is it is getting significantly more difficult to take long exposures where you don’t have a satellite passing over one or more of the optics that you're interested in. So, say that you're looking at a galaxy cluster. Well, if you get a Starlink satellite passing right over the galaxies you're interested in, that's no longer data you can use. So, you have to take more exposures to get the same amount of un-interfered with photons from the galaxies. So, if 1 in every 10 images is going to have a satellite knocking out an object in your busy galaxy cluster field, that's going to end up increasing by 10 percent how many images you have to take. 

                                    It’s not actually that bad. It’s just back-of-the-envelope math. But it’s going to have a multiple percentage impact as near as we can tell right now. And while we don’t have a grid orbiting out planet, I went camping during the summer and was shocked at the number of satellites that are now in the early evening sky. Luckily, it does mostly impact, for mid-latitudes, the early evening and the hours before dawn. So, that if you're out all night observing with your eyes during a meteor shower, you can tell when the sun is gonna come up because the number of satellites gets higher again.

Fraser: I think it’s really important to clarify the problem because the satellites are only visible when the satellite is illuminated when the Earth is in shadow. So, when it’s nighttime, you still need to have the satellite illuminated and that only occurs just after sunset and just before sunrise, and in regions that are relatively close to the horizon, which are typically fairly terrible places to point your telescope anyway. You wanna point your telescope straight up to go through the minimal amount of atmosphere.

Dr. Gay: You can get satellites straight overhead though, just to be clear. It all depends on the orbit they're in and how high up they are. The wild thing is that –

Fraser: And where you are. 

Dr. Gay: – the higher up, the more you see them.

Fraser: So, if you're in Canada, which has a fairly high latitude, then you're closer to the pole and there's a much better chance that sunlight in the summertime is gonna be peeking over the top of the planet for hours. And that's why I was mentioning before the show we could see the International Space Station on multiple passes because the sunlight is essentially going overtop of planet Earth while Earth where we are is in shadow. But you –

Dr. Gay: Right.

Fraser: – get the same problem in the Southern Hemisphere in places like Chile where all the big telescopes in the world are. They are closer to the South Pole and they have the same problem. So, it also really matters with the searches for, say, dangerous asteroids which are caught in the glow of the sun. You have to search for them near the horizon, near the sun shortly after sunset, shortly before sunrise. That’s the only time that you can find these potentially planet-killing asteroids, and that’s a problem. But one other problem is just the increased skyglow. And I think this was kinda unexpected. Can you talk about that?

Dr. Gay: Yes. So, you have two different things going on. So, first of all you have the specific light coming off of the satellite that allows you to see that bright streak through your image. But as I was saying, the light reflected off of satellites that have a rough surface, it’s coming out in an expanding cone, assuming flat surface. There's lots of geometry involved. That light coming through the atmosphere is then getting scattered around by the molecules and atoms in our atmosphere. And so, just like sunlight gets scattered to create the blue light we see during the day as our blue sky, the scattered light coming off of the satellites is causing not a blue sky our eyes can see but a change in how dark the sky appears to a telescope because of all that scattered light within the atmosphere, even in the night.

Fraser: And so, you're getting light pollution over top of these observatories, even though they're far away from any city –

Dr. Gay: Right.

Fraser: – any artificial lights because now these satellites are everywhere. And this problem is just starting to appear, but it’s going to get worse and worse and worse as there are more satellites in the sky.

Dr. Gay: It’s something where I often find myself asking “Do you want to be on Coruscant? This is how we get Coruscant.” And while –

Fraser: Right.

Dr. Gay: – they have flying cars more at the skyscraper height, this zipping around of satellites in low-Earth orbit is going to eventually create a world that looks like it has a swarm of gnats flying around it to not-too-distant space explorers.

Fraser: I think about Star Trek. You see the giant shipyards and dock facilities and you think, “Boy, what would be the light pollution of that thing?” Right? It would just be this gigantic, gleaming object that would be visible and casting shadows, and it would be like the full moon every night every time this thing passed overhead. It’s the downsides you don’t think of when you're excited about your Star Trek future.

Dr. Gay: One crazy calculation I ran preparing for the show that we will eventually record, I promise: when we were figuring out different things to calculate, I calculated how big would the International Space Station appear if it was at geostationary orbit. Right now, someone with a really good 14-inch or larger telescope on the planet has the ability to resolve out the solar panels and the basic shape of the International Space Station because it’s in low-Earth orbit.

Fraser: They've seen astronauts spacewalking.

Dr. Gay: Right. Now, if you boost the International Space Station all the way up to geostationary orbit, it’s about an arc second across. So, if you build your shipyard out at greater than geostationary distances, you would have this pinprick of stupidly bright like Venus moving through the sky. And I love this idea that something that’s so big could appear so small from the surface of the world. But reality is, they’ll probably put it a whole lot lower down. You can imagine in our sci-fi fantasy future putting it actually at geostationary so that you can do a space elevator. The future’s gonna get weird for the next three generations, assuming we don’t kill our planet. So, Star Trek, please.

Fraser: Right. 

Dr. Gay: Please, now.

Fraser: So, what can be done? Because we’ve had this conversation before that, on the one hand, satellite internet has the potential to provide high-speed internet access to a huge portion of humanity. And on the other side, the price that we’re gonna pay is a loss to ground-based telescopes. What can be done to solve this problem at least to some degree?

Dr. Gay: So, the shape of the satellite matters a lot in how much light it’s able to reflect back down to the planet. So, if you can change the profile so that the smallest possible surface area is facing our planet, that will help. Having rough surfaces helps. Having surfaces that don’t reflect easily helps because at that point you start getting into the infrared because if it doesn't reflect light well, it's going to warm up.

Fraser: Right. Then, it heats up. Right, or reflects radio waves. So, I think the most important thing in the short term is to provide real-time telemetry information to the telescopes, to the observatories. So, right now, there is no schedule for when various satellites are gonna be at various locations, and yet it should be. In fact, people have started to try and make this, but this is something that should just be supplied by the satellite operators and should be part of if you want a license, you have to provide real-time, down-to-the-nanosecond information about where your satellites are. 

                                    And so, then you integrate that with the giant observatories, and then they know that they can take pictures and pause for one second while the satellite is gonna more through the object that they're attempting to image. It doesn’t have to be the whole field of view. If they're just trying to get one little galaxy cluster, if you just wait a second before you start your observation run and you will then get the data that you need. This should be possible and this should have been mandated. And I can’t believe that we’re at this place where the telescopes aren’t getting real-time information about the satellites that they can then adjust. The classic example is the machine guns that timed, so they don’t shoot the propellors of the of the airplanes. You can just –

Dr. Gay: I love that.

Fraser: – time everything. That would be useful just in general across all observatories and you would get back pretty much all of the lost time from the satellites passing through your data. You won’t get back the skyglow, and there's kinda –

Dr. Gay: Right.

Fraser: – no place to hide from that. And obviously people are gonna say, “Well, just go to space,” but ground-based telescopes have their place in modern –

Dr. Gay: Right.

Fraser: – science. And so, we can’t just say, “Hey, let’s turn everything into space.” They have to work together, and I think they should have put mandates, made requirements, and we would be in a totally different place with a much better partnership between science and internet satellite providers.

Dr. Gay: Right. The one type of device that we just aren’t yet to a point of being able to put in orbit at all is the giant spectrographs that we used to get detailed analysis of the composition of fairly bright objects. These spectrographs are often the size of a basement underneath an observatory where equipment is very carefully put together, where that light is moving tens of meters around in all of its forays to eventually land on the detector spread out into that perfect rainbow we can analyze. Those require tweaking, they require trial and error to get everything absolutely perfect, and I don’t want to even try to imagine doing all of the optical bench alignments that are necessary with building something like that in space at this point in our development of human construction and on orbit. 

Fraser: So, fix your house. Fix your streetlights. Fix your country to give us back that night sky and try to figure out how to bring balance to our need to light our environment, to communicate with each other and our ability to explore the universe. They can co-exist. People just have to make this a priority. It’s an environment like any other and let’s stop trashing it. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Gay: Exactly. Thank you, Fraser. All right. So, I have a whole lot of people to thank this week. This week I would like to thank William E. Kraus, Matthias Heyden, Claudia Mastroianni, Jeff Willson, Cooper, Gregory Singleton, Tim McMackin, Kenneth Ryan, Alex Raine, Eran Segev, Allan Mohn, Paul D. Disney, Micheal Regan, NinjaNick, Scott Briggs, Benjamin Müller, Steven Shewalter, Michelle Cullen, Janelle aka Veronica_Cure, Omar Del Rivero, Dean McDaniel, Don Mundis, Peter, J. AlexAnderson, Matt Rucker, Benjamin Carryer, Jim McGihon, Anitusar, Mark Steven Rasnake, Moose and Deer. 

                                    Abraham Cottrill, Mark H. Widick, Philip Grand, Father Prax, schercm, Frode Tennebø, Bruce Amazeen, Dustin A. Ruoff, Paul L. Hayden, Gfour184, Sean Martz, Andrew Stephenson, planetar, Gabriel Gauffin, Steven Coffey, Cemanski, Glenn McDavid, Dwight Illk, Karthik Venkatraman, Brent Kreinop, Sam Brooks and his Mom, thank you. James Rodger, The Mysterious Mark, john öiseth, John Drake, Camy Raissian, Nate Detwiler, The Air Major. Thank you all. You allow us to do what we do which, weeks like this, are going to require a lot of our editing team. So, thank you for –

Fraser: Right.

Dr. Gay: – fueling our editing team.

Fraser: Thanks everybody and we’ll see you next week.

Dr. Gay: Bye-bye. Astronomy Cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy Cast is released under a Creative Commons attribution license. So, love it, share, and remix it, but please, credit to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website: astronomycast.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want help keep this show going, please consider joining our community at patreon.com/astronomycast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your Inbox and invites to online events. 

                                    We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast.

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Summer is officially, astronomically here. And for folks in the Northern Hemisphere, that means it’s the perfect time to head outside and see what’s happening in the sky. Today we’ll give you a good list of things to keep an eye out for, with or without a telescope.

Show Notes | Transcript

Meteorological Versus Astronomical Seasons (NCEI)

The Magellanic Clouds, our galactic neighbors (EarthSky)

See rare alignment of 5 planets and moon in stunning photo (Space.com)

Dark Adaptation of the Human Eye and the Value of Red Flashlights (NPS)

The phases of planets (NCCR – PlanetS)

What are Dobsonian Telescopes? (Space.com)

Mercury after sunset: Greatest elongation is August 27 (EarthSky)

Inferior Conjunction (Swinburne University)

International Space Station (NASA)

Spot the Station (NASA)

Heavens-Above

Tianhe, the core of the Chinese Space Station (The Planetary Society)

X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (U.S. Air Force)

Starlink

Delta Aquariid meteor shower: All you need to know in 2022 (EarthSky)

‘Unsustainable’: how satellite swarms pose a rising threat to astronomy (Nature)

Perseids Meteor Shower 2022 (Time and Date)

Sturgeon Moon Is the Full Moon in August (Time and Date)

Supermoon / Super Moon – Why and When? (Time and Date)

Aurora (Swinburne University)

Huge Solar Eruption With Unknown Origin Could Be Flying Towards Earth (Newsweek)

SpaceWeather.com

NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center (NOAA)

Solar Cycle 25 Is Here. NASA, NOAA Scientists Explain What That Means (NASA)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Summer Triangle: Signpost of the season (EarthSky)

The deep sky (Astronomy)

Open cluster (ESA Hubble)

What is a globular cluster? (EarthSky)

What Is a Nebula? (NASA)

Planetary Nebula (ESA Hubble)

Explore – The Night Sky | Hubble’s Messier Catalog (NASA)

The Beehive Cluster: A swarm of 1,000 stars (EarthSky)

Moon Phases 2022 – Lunar Calendar (Time and Date)

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(This is an automatically generated transcript)

Fraser Cain [00:01:49] Astronomy Cast episode 648 Summer observing. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, a weekly fact based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain and the publisher of Universe Today, but a space astronomy journalist for over 20 years. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey. What? How you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:14] I am doing well. I think it feels dangerous to say that phrase right now. Yeah. But, I’m currently contemplating. Is there going to be camping this summer? Now you go look at the awesome things we’re going to discuss in this episode, because prepping for this episode made me want to go camping. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:35] Yes. Yeah, I have definitely been getting the itch to get out and do some hiking and some and some camping. It’s a bunch of mountains I want to climb. The snow pack has been just ludicrous though, so it’s possible that we can’t do any high altitude hiking this summer because there’s still just too much snow up on the mountain. People are still skiing in June and I know right now it’s crazy. So yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:58] That that’s the way it used to be when we were kids, you know? 

Fraser Cain [00:03:02] Well, maybe not our mountains pretty can get a lot of snow, but, but not all the way through till the summer. Like, this is ludicrous. Yeah. Summer is officially astronomically here. And for the folks in the northern hemisphere, that means it’s a perfect time to head outside and see what’s happening in the sky. Today, we’ll give you a good list of things to keep an eye out for, with or without a telescope. All right, people in the Southern Hemisphere, do you notice I made that disclaimer? We understand that you exist. We appreciate you, but it’s going to be cold for you. And so you may want to stay inside. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:39] Or go on vacation up here. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:40] Or go on vacation to the north. Yeah. And maybe see a galaxy there. Neat. That was a subtle dig at the fact we have no galaxies in the sky. So, but anyway, but they have the large, large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and that’s. They are amazing. So. So they make up for it. All right, Pamela, let’s talk about this. So, man, I do. We do this every year, almost. We often do this. We’ll. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we will talk about some interesting things to see in the, in the sky over the summer. So, so let’s talk about some things that are transitory first and then we’ll talk about some old, old mainstays. And I think the thing that we should talk about that is that is not common is the rare alignment of the planets in the morning sky. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:29] Which is happening right now, right now. And and it’s amazing because they even ordered themselves in order. So like come the horizon up, right, right before sunrise, look to to the east and it goes Mercury. Venus. We’re standing on the Earth. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:49] Down to your feet for a second, then backlight. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:51] Mars. Jupiter. It’s it’s it’s amazing. They are all there. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:55] Anyway, all in a row in order. Yeah, yeah. And this is rare. Like, this isn’t going to happen again for several decades. And so if, if you see a bunch of planets in the sky and you aren’t sure which ones are which, now you can go outside and they’re all in a row. And so you can you can get to know them for how they look. Because like, you know, when you see Jupiter, it’s obviously different and bright and Venus is ludicrously bright, but sometimes it’s hard, you know, like, is that like, is that Saturn or is that a star. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:26] Right. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:27] And now you can tell and learn them. Now can you see Mercury from your house. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:33] If I go on the roof. Otherwise it’s lost to the trees. But we luckily have a hatch inside of our house to get onto the roof. And I may have done that a few times, mostly to find comets, because I have to admit, it scares the bejesus out of me to go onto the roof. But a comet can be worth it. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:52] Yes. Yeah, worth the risk. So then it’s DNA. I can’t see mercury. I’ve got. I’ve got mountains to the west of me and mountains to the east of me. And so there’s. I would have to go out to the West coast and then look, I guess in the, you know, when it’s in the, in the western sky. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:12] Yeah. When it’s American. 

Fraser Cain [00:06:13] Snapshots. Yeah. Yeah. Because then the only, you know, there’s nothing between me and Japan at that point, but from, from the east, from the, the east coast of the island where I live. Yeah. It’s I’ve got the mountain on one side and then I’ve got the, the coastal mountain range on the other side. And so it’s really hard to see that low down on the horizon. There’s what you need. So then like what’s the best way to take advantage of seeing all of these planets one after the other? 

Pamela Gay [00:06:41] Sadly, the best way to. Do it is to switch yourself over to being on a night schedule or get up at midnight. Let yourself get thoroughly dark, adapted, and set up a telescope at least a couple of inches in size, preferably more like a four inch. And just check them out one at a time and notice things like the inner planets are crescents, the outer planets aren’t necessarily full desks, and what we’re seeing is the planets actually have phases that we can see as we look at them traveling around the sun. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:21] Now Mars is entering its culture period, isn’t it? Yes, we’re entering one of the Mars windows. And so that’s a good, really good time to to look at Mars. And and then of course, Saturn and Jupiter again look amazing in small telescopes. So yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you can point them out with your eyes and go, yep, I’m looking at Mars. That’s amazing. But to really see the polar ice caps, to see the rings of Saturn, to see the bands across the planet on Jupiter, to see the moons, you really want that, that small telescope and don’t and don’t get fancy about it. Like don’t get sucked in to the latest $4,000 cyber telescope or the Goto telescope just to straight up like a four inch dobsonian six inch dobsonian. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:08] With a four inch DOB. You want a small table so that you’re not, like, awkwardly lying on the ground. Yeah, a four inch a four inch DOB on a little tiny folding table will make you happy. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:20] Yeah, and a six inch DOB will do everything you want. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:23] Yeah, exactly. And what’s what’s cool about this is you look now and then over time, you can see the planets diverge in their locations across the sky. And if you keep watching the different worlds, you’ll see the phases of Venus change. You’ll see Mars actually appear a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger as it gets closer and closer to being straight overhead at midnight. And it’s, it’s it’s seeing things change that it really becomes possible to fall in love with the mechanics of our solar system, as well as just the stunning views. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:03] Yeah. All right. I don’t think there’s any other big events, many, any like nonstandard weird events that are happening over the course of the summer. Can you think of anything else? 

Pamela Gay [00:09:14] So, so Mercury is doing its best to try and get itself noticed. So on August 27th, it is going to be at its greatest elongation east. This means it will be as far as it gets away from the sun in the pre sunrise sky. And July 16th, which is going to be the Saturday after our last episode of the season pretty much. I it is going to be directly behind the sun from us, which means we absolutely cannot see it. And it’s just cool to watch it as it comes out from behind the sun, and it goes from being as full as it gets, snuggled as close to the sun as it gets, to becoming more and more crescent as it goes towards those elongation phases, and then comes around so that we can no longer see it lit up when it’s at the inferior conjunction. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:14] So yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:15] Watch it from late July through to September, and you’ll be able to see Mercury go through all of its phases. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:24] So summertime for me often means that it’s International Space Station observing season. 

Pamela Gay [00:10:30] Yes. 

Fraser Cain [00:10:32] And so what’s sort of because I’m so far north during the summertime, the the sunlight gets above the eye, gets the horizon, and can hit the International Space Station for its entire journey across the sky. You know, if it if it starts its journey just after twilight. And you’ll often sometimes get two passes and sometimes even three passes or that third pass. Now you’re like 90 minutes later, then three hours later. And so you don’t get a full, complete pass. But but we can get three passes of the International Space Station visible from, from where I am. And it’s just great. I mean, you know, you go to a place like Heavens Above or there’s other places that will let you estimate the time when the space station is going to head right over head, and then you head outside, you know, you tell you having your friends over for some cocktails you like, hey, everybody, let’s go outside for a second and your good side. And then boom, there’s the space station flying overhead. It’s warm outside. You’re pointing in the sky. And, you know, people are learning their rhythms to this magic trick that you’ve just done to show them the International Space Station. I love doing that. And in fact, now with the Chinese station, with Tim, with the Tim win. You know, there are other fainter objects that you can also find as well. Same thing. User site like heavens above. You can find the Hubble Space Telescope when it’s flying above. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:00] Find the X-37b. That one, yes, just means no end. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:06] Yeah, yeah, yeah. The secret military space shuttle. You can. You can find it. And then, of course, there will be Starlink launches and. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:18] Yes. And the trains associated with that. Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:22] Yeah, you can watch the train as the satellites are moving past and and it is quite, you know, very noticeable train of dots that you can only see them for a day or so and then they’re to high altitude and then they’re invisible again. So highly recommend that you do that. So what what about what about you. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:40] Well I’m trying to figure out. Just go look up before the sky is swarming more than it is. And enjoy the satellites that we have now, before you become so overwhelmed with them later that you want to curse at them. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:55] Yeah, we’re still in the in. The satellites are cool phase, aren’t we? 

Pamela Gay [00:12:59] Yeah. And and right now we have July 18th through August 21st is going to be this wide swath of time when you can see the Delta aquarid meteors and and this large swath of time is because it’s from a comet that that orbits every 5.3 years and its orbit is is moving enough that there’s a large area of sky that it has left junk in over time. So with that particular, meteor shower, we can see about 20 meteors an hour, and sometimes you can see about 20 satellites an hour. And it’s super weird to be out there going. Is that a me? No, that’s a satellite. Is that a no? That’s a satellite. And and so go out and just see what there is to see and know that it’s going to get harder and harder to spot the meteors in the swarming satellites over time. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:03] Maybe. Maybe unless they I mean, it’s going to be definitely if you’re running a big observatory. But so far all of the starlink’s are they turn invisible to the unaided eye, even with perfectly dark skies. Yeah, the next generation, the Starlink 2.0 is, which is going to be a lot bigger. We’ll see. And it’s not just. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:21] The starlink’s, it’s it’s there’s so many different communications satellites, weather satellites, Earth imaging satellites and and with thousands of satellites going up per year, even if the majority of those are Starlink, there’s still going to be a whole bunch of other stuff going up. Now, luckily, a lot of these meteors can be seen in the middle of the night and and with with the Delta Aquarius, we get a certain amount of new moon privilege with that new moon on July 28th, so that it’s not wiping out the faintest meteors. Unfortunately, the Perseids this year. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:02] Which. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:04] Are normally such an amazing go out, watch them after midnight when most of the satellites can’t be seen. Kind of meteor shower. They kind of have well, the sturgeon moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:20] Right? Yeah. They’re kind of a full moon. They’re one day after the full moon. And so you’re going to have that that moon glaring all night, which. Like you think. It’s not going to be that bad, but it’s that bad when you go out there and there’s the full moon and you’re trying to see meteors, and you would have seen a pile of them, but all you see is just the full moon. And it kind of sucks. Like normally like if it’s like a three quarter moon, quarter moon, half moon. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:49] Good deal. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:50] But yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:52] Full moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:15:54] Yeah. Skip it. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:55] Not only is it a full moon it’s our moon changes distance ever so slightly throughout its orbit. So there are times when the full moon is bigger is brighter but a couple of percent. It’s, it’s enough that you can see it in photographs. It’s not enough that you can get. You should get super excited about a supermoon. But of course, the August 11th full moon that is interrupting the Perseids is one of those bigger and brighter. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:26] Yeah. Like they they increase brightness by about like 30%. So so it is noticeable and it just makes it that much worse. So yeah I like you because like normally we always recommend like okay, it’s the meteor shower. Gather your friends together. Do some planning to find out where your nice dark sky location is. Takes a bug spray. Take some chairs. Take some hot chocolate. Make an adventure out of it and you will have a story to tell your family. For years to come. And this year just don’t know. Skip it. Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:17:02] So I I’m probably going to try and go camping that week between New Moon and Full Moon, when we’ll be getting the very first few purses. And we’ll still be getting the Delta Aquarius. But yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s give. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:21] It let’s give it like, by all means. If you got like a nice place, you can stand outside and have a good view to the sky. You’ve got relatively dark skies and you’re okay to put up with the moon. Then give it a shot and you’ll see some. But yeah, it’s not, it’s not ideal. So I’ve got something interesting that I want people to keep an eye out for. And that is auroras. The sun is moving towards its solar maximum. And in fact, just the day that we’re recording or a day before this, a giant coronal mass ejection blasted directly at the Earth, increased auroral activities. People have reported seeing auroras. So you don’t know when and where it’s going to happen. But as long as you just keep track of the space weather, there must be an occasional aurora event over this this summer. And it’s, you know, they happen. They can happen any time of year. And they’re better in the winter because winter is longer. But still, you’ve got a shot to see them in the summertime. And don’t worry if you’re too far south, like, you know, the the sun is got so much activity. These solar storms can be so strong that you can see, I would say, auroras down to Northern California. South Dakota. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:38] The best aurora I ever saw were in August in New Hampshire during the last solar maximum. 

Fraser Cain [00:18:46] Yeah yeah, yeah. So take a like take a line, run it through the United States through like through the middle of the United States. And if you’re north of that line, I would say give it a shot. When you see like a strong aurora alert, go outside and you know, preplan in advance, a place you can go that’s to the north of where you are, that has a nice view to the horizon. Like if you could go to a lake or something, be able to see to the north. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:13] So you stay on the southern edge of the lake, look to the north from the beach. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:18] And even for the the folks in the southern hemisphere, you can see auroras too. So now it’s just everything’s the opposite. So yeah, look to the, you know, go to a place to. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:27] Stay on the. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:28] South. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:28] Side. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:29] Yeah. Look to the south and be able to look to the south and, and hopefully you’ll be able to see something. So and I can’t tell you when you have to keep track of the space weather, NOAA, NOAA. But if you do search for like space weather on Google, you can find what the current space weather activities are. There’s apps. I apologize, I don’t have an app that I like the best right now. 

Pamela Gay [00:19:50] I don’t either. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:51] Ferrari. I find they’re they’re kind of ad filled and and you can’t rely on them. So I tend to just go to, to NOAA’s website and search from there. So NOAA do a search for that space weather. You should be able to find out when events are happening. And then, you know, I always say you miss 100% of the auroras that you don’t try to see. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:14] Yeah, yeah. You never know just when you’re going to get lucky. And even though the forecast says you have to be far more north, they’ll show up in Maryland. They like the. 

Fraser Cain [00:20:25] Track. Exactly. All right. So let’s talk about the things to observe. Serve in the summer sky that are annual crowd pleasers, just not during the full moon. 

Pamela Gay [00:20:36] So I think that summer triangle with the great Milky Way sprawling across it is Cygnus. The Swan flies along. It’s it’s a wonderful time of year to just get to know the nebulae, the star forming regions, open clusters. I I’m a December kind of person, but the summer sky is is when you get to see our own galaxy. It’s in the winter that you can start to escape to the rest of the universe. But the summer belongs to the disc. It belongs to. You know, all that dust and gas that is so annoying to extragalactic astronomers and those of us interested in the stuff in the outer halo. But if you want to see stars forming and everything else, now’s the time to look. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:32] And if you’ve still got that Dobsonian telescope that you bought for the planets, then you can definitely put it to work. If you see some fuzzy bit in the sky, point the telescope, see what you can see. You can get a book and learn some of your constellations. You can see where some of the open clusters are, where some of the globular clusters are. There’s a lot to see in the sky Nebula, planetary nebula, all kinds of good stuff. But it’s also great to use a pair of binoculars, and that’s all the time. What binoculars do you recommend for this kind of thing? 

Pamela Gay [00:22:06] I would say nothing less powerful than ten by 50s. And and that is a good size for small hands. It gives you a large swath of the sky that you can see. It’s a great beginning pair and that that is saying it’s going to magnify it by a factor of ten. And you have this 50 millimeter aperture of light that’s letting the light in. And and that combination lets you start to see, all of the Messier objects as at least being fuzzy points on the sky when you’re in a dark place. It won’t work if you’re not in a dark place, but for a dark place that gets you. The entire Messier catalog is a little fuzzy spots. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:54] Some better than others. I mean, summer, yeah. Really impressive in a pair of binoculars. 

Pamela Gay [00:22:59] Yes. One of my favorite objects for this time of year. Late at night, going into the early morning. And it will get earlier and earlier as the summer progresses. There is the double cluster, which is off the constellation Cassiopeia. It is, two different clusters that are side by side and form a double puff ball. And it looks kind of like you might imagine one of those cartoon beehives looking, it’s it’s just cool. There’s so many different things to explore. And for me, I think my favorite memories are before I actually knew how to consistently find stuff from when I would just go outside with binoculars in the summer, and so much bug spray, so much bug spray and just lay out in a hammock or on a sleeping bag on asphalt, not directly on the grass because ticks people there are problem. And just look around and then try and figure out what it was I just found. So doing things backwards, exploring, seeing what’s cool, and then figuring out what it was I had found. 

Fraser Cain [00:24:14] Yeah, I had the exact same experience where I would you take binoculars or my small telescope? I would see something in the sky that looked like a fuzzy bit, and sometimes you would you would see it out of your peripheral vision, and then you look, you figure out exactly where it was, and then you would point your telescope at that fuzzy bit. And what do you know? It’s something it’s an open cluster. It’s a galaxy. It’s kind of a great way to go about, you know, if it’s if there’s a fuzzy bit in the sky, it’s a thing. I’ve got a pair of the, the 15 by 70 fives from Celestron and they’re pretty beefy. But we use them all the time both for the night sky but also for like, birds. Wildlife here. They’re great. So I do recommend them, but. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:00] Anything bigger than that, you have to have a tripod. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:04] Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can buy like a 25 by 100, but yeah, I have. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:09] The pictures as well. 

Fraser Cain [00:25:10] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they’re not the one you grab because they’re just so tough. Yeah. Anything else that you recommend people take a look at this summer. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:19] So we haven’t brought up Saturn. And Saturn’s actually going to be at opposition on August 14th. And. What is really cool is to make a point of looking at Saturn, every opposition and seeing how over time we can watch the rings change their tilt. So every year, opposition is going to appear a slightly different point in the year, and every year those rings are going to appear slightly different as it orbits, and we get to align with it at a different point in its orbit. And. With opposition at August 14th. That means it will be straight overhead that. But we’ll get to enjoy it for pretty much the entire summer. So if you’ve never seen Saturn through a telescope, it is one of those objects that you look at. And most people’s initial reaction is, is that real? 

Fraser Cain [00:26:19] That can’t be real. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:20] Yeah, yeah. And it’s totally real. It is. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:23] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:24] Totally real. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:26] So great. All right. One. Don’t forget about the moon. Moons. Moons can do the regular moon things. So if you do it again or outside, definitely check out the moon and take note of how it changes over the month. Take a look at it when you see that first crescent, and then take a look when it’s a nice. Like when you see half of the moon, and then see how terrible it looks when it’s a full moon. 

Pamela Gay [00:26:50] So June 28th is that new moon. And then sadly, August 11th, destroying the Perseids. Is that full moon? Go out and watch it down. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:02] So good. All right. Well, thank you, Pamela. I hope everyone takes some of our advice and let us know what you saw this summer. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:09] Sounds awesome. Fraser. Thank you. And and thank you to all the people out there in our audience who make this show possible with your generous contributions through our Patreon. We know that in these times of rising everything prices, it’s hard to find the extra to give. And to those of you who can. Thank you. This week I would like to thank Minsky, Peter, John Drake, Dean Shawn, Freema Blitzer, the Cat, Tim Gerrish, John, USAF Corning Dump truck, Roland Vollmer, Dom Benjamin Davies, Arctic fox, Claudia mastroianni, Brian. Kilby, Natalia Lu Zealand, Jordan Turner, Lee ha, born Jason, caduceus, Olivia, Brianne. Zang, Ron. Thorson, Papa 1062 Robert Hundley, Kim. Baron. Vitale, Paul. Esposito, Arthur. Latz. Hall, Frank. Stewart, Ganesh. Swaminathan, Bob. Zat, ski the air, Major Ruben McCarthy, time Lord, erode, Jeff McDonald and Iggy Hammock. Thank you all so much. You make what we do possible. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:23] Thank you everyone, and we’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:25] Bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

Pamela has told us in the most flowery terms about the diffuse dust across inner solar system. Leftover from the formation the inner planets. Well, it turns out, she was wrong. Super wrong. Time to update.

Download MP3 | Show Notes | Transcript

Serendipitous Juno Spacecraft Detections Shatter Ideas About Origin of Zodiacal Light (NASA)

South African Astronomical Observatory

Backscatter (Wikipedia)

Zodiacal Light (Swinburne University)

NASA’s Juno spacecraft

Sand and Dust Storms (World Meteorological Organization)

Mars Moons (NASA)

Martian dust storms parch the planet by driving water into space (Science Magazine)

Mars Exploration Rover – Opportunity (NASA)

Opportunity lost: NASA says goodbye to pioneering Mars rover (Nature)

Mars Volcanoes (Smithsonian Air and Space Museum)

Why volcanic ash is such a dangerous hazard to airplanes (Washington Post)

2010 eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull (USGS)

Pamela’s Twitter

ABSTRACT: The OSIRIS-REx Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Event and Implications for the Nature of the Returned Sample (pdf)

Zodiacal light: All you need to know (EarthSky)

Transcriptions provided by GMR Transcription Services

Fraser:                         Astronomy Cast Ep. 599: Zodiacal Light. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, your weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, publisher of The Universe Today, with me as always, Dr. Pamela Gay, senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pam, how are you doing? 

Dr. Pamela:                 I am doing well, I have a new microphone. It is identical to the old microphone. The microphone is dead. Long live the identical microphone.

Fraser:                         Right? This is the new something, same as the old something.   What’s happening? Five ninety-nine, we are one episode away from a completely irrelevant number, 600. 

Dr. Pamela:                 It’s still cool to know we’ve been ticking along here. What’s really starting to get to me is the number of people who are like, “Yeah, I started listening to you when I had my kid and they’re now a teenager.”

Fraser:                         Yeah, now they are a senior citizen, yeah

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah.

Fraser:                         Yeah, we’ve had a couple of those emails or if someone’s like, “I started listening to you when I was a teenager and I just got my doctorate.”

Dr. Pamela:                 Yes, yes, or people coming up to us at conferences, this happened in Hawaii, “I started listening to you in high school, I’m now a post-doc.”

Fraser:                         Now a post-doc, yep, exactly. No, I don’t feel old, but thank you for bringing that up.

Dr. Pamela:                 But, it is a good excuse to, especially now that we’ve had this year’s AAS meeting and LPSC meeting, to basically say, “These are the things we’re now looking forward to,” so, that’s next week.

Fraser:                         But you know what? I’m just gonna say that, you, I hope seeing us do this 599 times, have some sense that there’s a stability going on that Pamela and I are in this for the long haul, that we’re going to keep bringing you space and Astronomy goodness for, I think as long as we live. You should join our Patrion.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, we’re here until our voices –

Fraser:                         Give out.

Dr. Pamela:                 – breakdown.

Fraser:                         Exactly, and we re-joined the cosmos.

Dr. Pamela:                 Exactly.

Fraser:                         So go to patreon.com/astronomycast and you can just support the work that we do, and help make sure that we can get as much space and astronomy information freely available and educate as many people in the world about what’s going on in the cosmos.

Dr. Pamela:                 So, yeah, it’s awesome, help us do more awesome, thank you, that’s all.

Fraser:                         Thank you. Pamela has told us in the most flowery terms about the diffused dust across the inner solar system, leftover from the formation of the inner planets. Well, it turns out she was wrong, super wrong, time to update. And we’ll get into that at all the levels of Pamela’s wrongness, after this short break. And we’re back. So, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah.

Fraser:                         Zodiacal Light.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah.

Fraser:                         Yeah, you’ve brought it up many times, and it is always about this cool idea that you can go out, take some pictures, you could see this leftover dust, from the formation of the solar system.

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, and also, I said from comets, from asteroids hitting into each other.

Fraser:                         Yeah, nope. All wrong.

Dr. Pamela:                 I was so wrong.

Fraser:                         I love it, I love it. It’s funny, we did this, we cover this topic over on the Weekly Space Hangout, and Moya McTier was the one who brought up the story and she was like, “Yeah, I found this story,” and I’m like, I couldn’t believe how important this is. This was the biggest news of the week, probably the biggest news of the month, in my opinion. And one of the big news stories of the year. And I think as amateur Astronomers, we are all about Zodiacal Light. So, to get that picture, it’s like one of those achievements, you get Aurora, you get Zodiacal Light.

Dr. Pamela:                 Have you succeeded?

Fraser:                         Never, no, I’ve never seen it, I’ve never taken a picture of it, never.

Dr. Pamela:                 Oh man, I’ve gotten to see it a few times. The most striking was, I was in South Africa at the observatory they have North of Cape Town in Sutherland, and a group of us had spent the night just watching the Southern sky rotate above us, and we thought dawn was coming, and it wasn’t the dawn, it was the Zodiacal Light becoming that much brighter as the angle between us, the dust and the sun got smaller and smaller.

And, it was really this striking column shooting up from the sky, and going in the angle tracing towards where all the planets were along the elliptical. It was really awesome.

Fraser:                         Oh, yeah, amazing, okay, all right. So, what is it?

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, observationally from Earth, it is the glow of backscattered light from the sun. So, when we look out in space, there’s this toroid of dust particles, a doughnut of dust particles, around the sun, and the sunlight going out past the earth, hits these dust particles and scatters back toward us.

Fraser:                         So, it’s like light pollution, so, like light pollution in the inner solar system.

Dr. Pamela:                 But it’s so faint, that a bright Jupiter can dry any of it out, and any amount of light pollution from cars, humans, streetlights, the moon, you can’t see it. So, you really do need to go to a dark sky park, an observatory of some kind, where you know there are actually dark skies and check the calendar to make sure there’s no moon first.

Fraser:                         All right, and then just to really rub this in one last time, what did you used to say a Zodiacal Light was?

Dr. Pamela:                 I used to say it was leftover dust, scattered from comets, tales from asteroids, colliding together, and other events that messed up our solar system.

Fraser:                         Right.

Dr. Pamela:                 I was wrong.

Fraser:                         And so, what do we now know is Zodiacal Light this week?

Dr. Pamela:                 This week?

Fraser:                         Yeah.

Dr. Pamela:                 And these are results that come from the Juno mission. The Juno spacecraft flew through the vicinity of the asteroids, flew through the vicinity of Mars, travelled on its way out towards Jupiter. And along the way, they were studying Zodiacal Light, dust particles in the most amazing way.

Fraser:                         Yeah, the way you would study bugs, as they smashed against your windshield.

Dr. Pamela:                 A little worse than that.

Fraser:                         Bugs made of metal.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, they realized that the orbit of the dust particles that make up the Zodiacal Light, matches the orbit of Mars, and Mars or its moons or possibly its dust storms are somehow to blame, for the Zodiacal Light we see. 

Fraser:                         And so, this is the payoff, this idea that in fact, all of this Zodiacal Light, this dust that you see, just after sunset, just before sunrise is just Mars, dirt from Mars, filling this entire donut space. Now you mentioned a few possible sources of where this dust could be coming from, and we will get to that in one second, but first let’s have another break.

And we’re back. All right. So, let’s talk about what are the possible sources of this, because now if this sort of, and in fact it – yeah, we’ll talk about the possible sources and then we’ll think about the consequences of this, but you mentioned some briefly, let’s go through them one by one. It comes from the moons of Mars?

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, so let’s back up one step further to what we know.

Fraser:                         Okay.

Dr. Pamela:                 What we know is dust particles that – think sand storm dust, dust storm over Beijing, dust storm over the Sahara, dust storm over Tucson, dust, flying through the universe, specifically our solar system, at thousands and thousands of miles per hour, hit the giant solar panels on the Juno mission.

Some of the largest solar panels out there, and chipped off pieces of the solar panels and those chipped off pieces, based on their size and their velocity, allowed scientists to determine the velocity mass energy combination of that dust. So, basically it’s like throwing small rocks.

Fraser:                         Yeah, flying through sandpaper. 

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, and then figuring out what hit you based on the chip that gets knocked off and where it lands.

Fraser:                         Right.  And so, was the damage to Juno more than scientists were expecting that it would face, going through this region of the solar system?

Dr. Pamela:                 It wasn’t significantly different, but it was different. We weren’t expecting to have things that had this kind of an orbit, and the pieces of dust were on average, a bit bigger than expected, but to be clear, Juno solar panels are fine.

Fraser:                         Right, right.

Dr. Pamela:                 They are huge, this was minimal damage. This was damaged in the name of science, I’m pretty sure everyone’s good with this. 

Fraser:                         Right, okay, okay. And so, now astronomers, based on these trajectories, based on the size, based on other factors, they were able to determine that this was material that had come from Mars?

Dr. Pamela:                 Comes from Mars, and this is because it has the same orbital characteristics, the same tilt relative to all the other planets. And the same eccentricity, even. So, it’s the same amount of not a circle as Mars orbits.

 Fraser:                        Same, amount of not a circle, that’s a great way of describing eccentricity. But yeah, it follows the same elliptical orbit around the sun as Mars does. And I think that angle is really important that each of the planets have, they largely follow the plane of the ecliptic, but each one is a little off, a little tilted away.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, it’s a badly nested group of hula hoops.

Fraser:                         Right, the elliptical hula hoops.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yes.

Fraser:                         Bad loops that are badly nested.

Dr Pamela Gay:          Yes.

Fraser:                         So, all right, so now we’ve got this fairly convincing case that the dust does come from Mars, and then back to my original question, you mentioned three possibilities, let’s go through these one by one. So, what would it mean if this dust came from the moons of Mars?

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, if it came from the moon of Mars, this is actually not too bad of a thing to try and understand. Because these are little tiny moons, they don’t have a lot of gravity. If you hit them fairly hard, chunks are gonna fly off. And in fact, there are theories that describe the formation of the moons as being a cyclical process, where different objects over time have been torn apart and come back together.

So, this is actually reasonable, more information specifically about the composition of the moons, the composition of the dust is needed, Juno didn’t have the capabilities to do something like that.

Fraser:                         Wow.

Dr. Pamela:                 But, it’s completely reasonable that stuff would come from the moons, but it’s a lot of stuff, and they’re little tiny moons.

Fraser:                         Right.

Dr. Pamela:                 So, yeah. 

Fraser:                         That will be tricky, okay, so that’s the first possibility, is that you’ve got this stuff coming from the moons and so you can just imagine, they’re getting impacted, debris is flying off of the moons, making its way into space, but it seems like a surprising amount of dust.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah.

Fraser:                         Enough to give amateur astronomers something to chase after. It seems quite impressive. So, the next idea you mentioned was maybe Mars itself.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, and so here, the science teams have actually mentioned the possibility that even though they can’t explain how it would happen, that the dust storms that periodically completely enshroud Mars, these are the same dust storms that are responsible for the death of the Opportunity rover, little Oppy when it’s – it was no longer able to get enough sunlight to keep itself warm, and talking with earth, these world in shrouding dust storms, we know they kick dust up into the upper most levels of Mars atmosphere.

But then the question becomes, when you have a world like this, is it possible that some of that dust is somehow put on escape trajectories? And they can’t really explain that, but what they’re seeing seems consistent with that particular type of dust just filling our solar system.

Fraser:                         And I think this is really impressive when you think about, as you said that these dust storms, these giant dramatic dust storms, that every few years will fill the entire planet, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable, and yet the atmosphere only goes so high, it’s not that thick and to hit escape velocity from Mars, has lower gravity seems impressive. 

Dr. Pamela:                 But this is a lot of material that had to hit escape velocities, admittedly, over the five, some odd billion years for our solar system.

Fraser:                         But that would also mean, I mean, we know that back in the day, Mars was a water world that like the earth had water on it, it had cooler temperatures, it didn’t have just these constant blowing dust storms. And yet over time, the planet died, the dust storms kicked up, and so, this Zodiacal Light is not a mark of the creation of the solar system, it’s a memory of the death of Mars. An ongoing reminder that Mars is a dead world.

Dr. Pamela:                 And it could be an ongoing reminder, that it’s a world that’s gotten knocked about pretty violently over the eons, and we know that whatever it was that hit the earth and killed the dinosaurs, creating the Chicxulub crater. The shockwaves from that sent, dirt, rubble, and very dead dinosaurs that escape velocities out of our atmosphere.

. 

Fraser:                         Yeah, and I mean, we have some situations that are somewhat similar, like when you think about, say, the rings of Saturn, although the source of most of the rings of Saturn aren’t known, we know that the E-ring, has material that has been blasted out by the, ice volcanoes on Enceladus, and have gone into orbit around Saturn, and so you’ve got this source of dust, that is being sprayed into a ring and so there’s a similar version of that.

All right, well, we’ll continue to search for a possible source of this dust in a second, but first let’s have another break. And we’re back. So, those both seem to have problems, and what was the third idea?

Dr. Pamela:                 I don’t remember actually stating –

Fraser:                         Oh, did you not?

Dr. Pamela:                 – a third.

Fraser:                         Okay.

Dr. Pamela:                 No.

Fraser:                         Yeah, I thought it was just Mars getting smashed by asteroids in the past and that being turned into –

Dr. Pamela:                 So, that is a true thing, but we incorporated in there.

Fraser:                         – Okay, all right.

Dr. Pamela:                 But so, here’s the thing, this is a data release of, we saw this dust, we cannot fully explain the dust yet. We realized from the orbit of the dust, that it seems to originate from Mars and another factor that’s consistent with this, is there was a sharp cut off in the distribution of the dust as the spacecraft got closer to Jupiter, to that region of space where Jupiter’s gravitational influence would have said, “I don’t want any of this dust to dust to other places.”

So, the distribution dynamically, is consistent with Mars, Mars, Mars. And this allows us still at this point, without knowing the chemistry of it, to dream big. And so, reading this, I was like, “I wonder if it could have come at all from past volcanism,” and there’s these giant volcanoes.

Fraser:                         That is an awesome idea.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, and they did not say that. This is me as a scientist, looking at what are all the possibilities, desperately wanting chemistry.  

Fraser:                         Well, desperately wanting super volcanoes. 

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, there’s that too.

Fraser:                         Yeah.

Dr. Pamela:                 It’s a known phenomenon people.

Fraser:                         Right.

Dr. Pamela:                 I like volcanoes.

Fraser:                         But I wonder if you had an Olympus Mons erupting, would it be throwing lava into solar orbit?

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, it wouldn’t be throwing lava, but it could be throwing –

Fraser:                         Dust.

Dr. Pamela:                 – ash.

Fraser:                         Right. Wow.

Dr. Pamela:                 And these are the things I still need to figure out. And volcanic glass, as was experienced by a few too many aircraft, when the unpronounceable Iceland volcano, went off in 2010, it is nasty shreddy stuff. And this is to the point where I wanted to bring these scientists on for an interview, and basically go, “Okay, how about – tell me, I wanna know. “

Fraser:                         How about this? How about that? How about this?

Dr. Pamela:                 Right. Because, on our world Etna is able to fountain lava a kilometre up into the air. We saw the Icelandic volcanoes able to shoot things six kilometres up into the air. And we have so much more gravity. So, what is possible?

Fraser:                         On that note, if you want, adorable volcano pictures, you should follow Pamela’s Twitter feed, she put, it was like Etna yesterday, I think.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah.

Fraser:                         Yeah, yeah, you’re quite the volcano fan.

Dr. Pamela:                 I stan for my volcanoes.

Fraser:                         So, I love this in so many ways, that you have this thing that you thought you knew where it came from, and now new evidence pops in that goes, “Nope, here’s the source.” And now the question is, what’s the mechanism? And now we’re back to hypotheses again.

Pamela Gay:               Yes.

Fraser:                         And there’s a few that the science-y, but again, they discover is that it’s not really their problem. “Hey, we found this thing, it came from Mars, next.” And now the scientific community goes at it, and they propose hypotheses. And you just proposed one, maybe it was volcanoes, maybe it was asteroid impacts, maybe it comes from whatever event created the Martian moons, maybe it’s further evidence of it, maybe it’s the – maybe it’s those dust storms.

Dr. Pamela:                 Maybe it’s those dust storms do cause craziness.

Fraser:                         Yeah, and so, now the question is trying to gather evidence, for each one of these possible hypotheses, trying to figure out ways that you can falsify them. This is just a beautiful example of science in action, this is how it works

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, and it also raises the question of, where did all the dust from all the colliding asteroids go? Because we know those suckers collide, because the asteroid Benu is essentially the consistency of a ball pit in orbit. It’s not a rubble pile in space. Unless the rubble is made of styrofoam, in terms of what the spacecraft experienced. The gravity is so low. I don’t know if you saw this, but Donte Loretta was saying, that the Cyrus Rex spacecraft would’ve gone meters in to the surface of Benu had they not been firing rockets with thrusters rather.

Fraser:                         Right. It just would’ve gone plunging into it, splashing into the rock of Bennu. That’s amazing.

Dr. Pamela:                 And so, the gravitational pull that Bennu exerts on all of its own rocks is like what earth exerts on ball pit balls.

Fraser:                         Yeah.

Dr. Pamela:                 Yeah, so, there’s a lot of stuff out there. And so, now we need to know where did it go? Maybe as Zodiacal dust will turn out to be a mixture of different things. There’s so many questions, so many questions.

Fraser:                         And so, before we go, you have seen it, you have taken pictures of it. If people want to get photographs, cause it’s still beautiful even though we have a new answer for it, if you want to capture an image of Zodiacal Light, as an amateur astronomer, astrophotographer, how should you go about it? 

Dr. Pamela:                 Well, right now is actually a really good time. The best times of year to see it are around the equinoxes. The same is true of Aurora. So, go out, I believe right now it’s evening, twilight is the best. Do double check me on that, and go out, look up in the Twilight. And the reason I’m saying double check is, I don’t remember which of the two hemispheres, it’s evening Twilight is best for.

And what you’re waiting for is that moment before the sun’s light starts to eliminate the sky. When the sunlight reflected off the dust creates a streak along the path that is filled with planets, the elliptic across the sky.

Fraser:                         Fantastic. Yeah, if you haven’t seen it, you should go out and try.

[Crosstalk]

Fraser:                         You need dark skies. Yeah, and do you have some names for us this week?

Dr. Pamela:                 I do. So, as always, our show is brought to you, thanks to you. Your support allows us to pay our server costs, to pay Allie and Rich to edit our shows together, to pay Nancy, to make sure that we don’t get lost along the way, to have Beth doing all the social media work for us. It takes a team to do everything Fraser and I do, and to keep him and I on the straight and narrow and we do require herding.

Fraser:                         Hey, you noticed that our shows get start roughly on time every week? Yeah.

Dr. Pamela:                 We are now herded, which is excellent. So, this week I would like to thank the generous contributions of Matthew Horstman, Arthur Latz-Hall, Omar Del Rivero, Tim Gerrish, John, Paul L Hayden, Marco Iarossi, J. AlexAnderson, William Lauer, Jeremy Kerwin, Dustin A. Ruoff, Michelle Culle, Brian Kilby, Brent Kreinop, Marc Steven Rasnake, Roland Warmerdam, The Lonely Sand Person, Steven Coffey, Ronald McCoy, Aron Tannenbaum, Ruben McCarthy, Geoff MacDonald, Wayne Johnson, Iggy Hammick, Jordan Young and Catherine McCabe.Thank you so much, all of you, for everything you do to support us month after month.

Fraser:                         Thanks everyone.

Dr. Pamela:                 Bye-bye everyone.

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