Welcome to the Starcast for the week of August 10th, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski.

Good morning, Jay.

Good morning, Mike\! Let's take a look at space weather from SpaceWeather.com. Mike, what's happening with the sun over the next couple days?

Well, Jay, there is a large coronal hole in the southern half of the sun that is streaming some solar wind toward the Earth. We may see that wind hit our magnetosphere here in the next 24 to 48 hours, so mid-latitude, we're looking at about a 45% chance of an active condition with a 25% chance of a minor solar storm. And just a mere 5% chance of a severe storm. Of course, we did have a pretty good storm yesterday, hitting KP6. That created a G2 class storm, and I understand that northern lights were visible in Utah. I, unfortunately, due to wildfire smoke, was unable to capture anything here in Crestone.

So, what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay?

Well, this week, we have an interesting planetary conjunction. Early Tuesday morning, Venus and Jupiter will shine in conjunction. They'll be less than a degree apart, and they'll rise about an hour before dawn in the east, northeast sky. So I might want to wake up early and take a look at those two bright planets together. And then on Tuesday the 12th, is the Perseid meteor shower peaks. However, with the bright, waning gibbous moon shining all night and washing the sky out, we'll hide most of the meteors, but a few of the brightest ones always do shine through, especially if you're in a cloud or smoke-free sky and you're just a little bit lucky. And then finally, on Friday, just after midnight, so at 1:12 a.m. Saturday morning, Eastern Daylight Time, to be exact, we have the last quarter moon. So, now let's take a look at some space news. Mike?

Thanks, Jay. Big news this week coming out of NASA is that the Trump administration is apparently planning to shut down two major carbon monitoring satellite missions: the OCO2 and OCO3. That's Orbiting Carbon Observatory. OCO2 is a free orbiting satellite that was launched in 2014. OCO3 is connected to the International Space Station on the... there's a Japanese scientific module that it is attached to. And there are indications that the Trump administration wants to deorbit OCO2 and destroy it and turn off OCO3. The acting administrator, Sean Duffy, and other senior NASA officials have been secretly directing employees to draw up termination plans, and that these missions are slated to be defunded in the 2026 President's budget request. These satellites provide valuable data on climate change and also on global photosynthesis, and that's used by the agriculture industry. So shutting this down would not only hinder our ability to monitor climate change, but it could also diminish our ability to provide accurate agricultural forecasts. And I'll just mention that with the OCO missions, we've learned quite a bit, including the fact that the Amazon is not the carbon sink it was believed to be. In fact, the Amazon emits more carbon than it absorbs. But that the boreal forests and permafrost regions of the north are bigger carbon sinks than were previously understood. And this ability to monitor photosynthesis is also critical to being able to predict crop failures, famines, and damaged that could lead to political instability and mass migration, so there's a lot of downstream effects if these satellites are canceled and destroyed, and reportedly, there are people in NASA who are seeking private funding to keep the missions going.

Okay, and other news, astronomers using this James Webb Space Telescope have potentially discovered a Saturn-mass planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, a star in the closest solar system to our own. This potential gas giant was directly imaged using the telescope's mid-infrared instrument, which employs a coronagraphic mask to block out the bright glare of the stars. While the planet itself isn't habitable, it's situated in the star's habitable zone, meaning that any of the moons that could... any of its moons could potentially support life. The discovery is challenging to confirm due to the brightness and the proximity of the two main stars in the Alpha Centauri system, A and B. However, its detection aligns with the previous tentative siting and further observations are planned to confirm its existence, which would be a groundbreaking find challenging current theories of planetary formation.

So, speaking of exoplanets, coincidentally, one of my side hustles is being a co-host at an Airbnb here in Trace Beatrus, New Mexico. And our guests at the B\&B this weekend happened to be a group of exoplanet astronomers with the Next Generation Transit Survey. They were attending a conference at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and are visiting Trace Pieters for our dark skies. So I've asked them to join us on the podcast as special guests, and they have graciously agreed to having Mike and I asked them about their research. So, guys, first, can you introduce yourselves and tell you where each of you are from?

Yeah, sure. Okay, I'll start. So, my name's Daniel Bayliss. Originally I'm from New Zealand, so I grew up in the dark sky region of New Zealand. But I'm now living in England, and I'm at the University of Warwick, where I'm an assistant professor, and I research exoplanets, and mainly transiting exoplanets, and I guess we'll talk a little bit more about that soon.

Hi, I'm Toby Riddell. I'm a PhD student at Queen's University Belfast, although I'm originally from Nottingham in England. And I'm also interested in researching long-period transiting planets with the next generation transit survey.

Hi, and I'm Peter Wheelie. Like Dan, I'm from the University of Warwick in the UK. I grew up in London. And I'm a professor now at Warwick, and I lead this project on NGTS, this Next Generation Transit Survey, searching for new exoplanets, and I also do some work studying their atmospheres with James Webb.

Oh, wow, that's a big name. Can you tell us a little bit about the Next Generation Transit Survey?

Sure, yeah, so NGTS is a facility we have in Paranale, Chile, which is one of the best night sky observing spots in the world. It's right in the middle of the Atacama Desert, which is, I think, the driest desert on Earth, and we have 12 20cm telescopes that are all independently robotically mounted. So we can point them at different targets to maximize our coverage, or we can point them all at the same target, and that stacks our precision, so we can get really precise photometry.

Perhaps I could just add that although the telescopes are quite small, we spent about 6 years doing the design work to really make sure they could make the most precise measurements of planet transits, because these transits are very shallow, and you need really high precision measurements to find the smaller planets, especially.

Okay, and so, what was the first generation transit survey?

Well, I mean, in a way, a lot of us worked on a project called WASP back in the day. You may have heard of WASP. It generated lots of hot Jupiter-type planets, and there were two telescopes, there was one based in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, and one in South Africa. And that was really successful at finding really big planets, but we realized when we worked on the data that there was improvements that could be made to push the precision to get to smaller planets. And so the next generation was the idea was that we could take those lessons learned and find some smaller planets, which we did. We found the first hot Neptune planets in what's known as the Neptune Desert, so very close into the stars, there's a region with very few Neptune-sized planets. We managed to find the first in that region, which we called NGTS4B in the classic astronomer's unimaginative naming system.

Okay, so, there seems to be kind of a frenzy of exoplanet discoveries, and it seems that they're almost being announced every day. Do you think it is time goes on that some of these will be found to be false positives?

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question, and we've always... we always worry about false positives when we're trying to discover these systems. I think a lot of the systems that are being found now around bright stars, we're really able to characterize them, not only find that they're transiting, but we do a measurement called radial velocity spectroscopy, where we can see that the star's wobbling due to the planet. And with these two independent methods seeing a transit and seeing the star wobble, I think we are very, very confident of those detections. As the stars get fainter and you can't do radial velocity, then sometimes we have to rely on statistics, and that was used, for example, for the Kepler mission. But I think most of the systems that you're hearing about being announced from transit missions like TESS, we're fairly confident that we are really seeing transiting planets there. There's not too many false positives.

Okay. Daniel, I saw your paper on smaller telescope arrays for detecting exoplanets and it was talking about CCDs, and I know Mike had a question for you about the difference between CCDs and... Mike?

Well, yeah, the NGTS website mentions that there's work with Andor's scientific CMOS cameras, and I'm just curious to know how that's going. Do you see CMOS replacing CCD?

Yeah, great. So I've got a PhD student, Yanis, who's working full-time on testing the new generation of CMOS cameras. So, in the past, astronomers have always used CCDs, they've given us the highest precision measurements for photometry, so missions like Kepler and TESS and NGTS have used CCDs. But CMOS technology is really where all the research is being put in at the industry level. All our phones, all our webcams, they're all CMOS. And the new generation of CMOS cameras, we've we've mounted one of them on one of the NGTS telescopes, and we've been able to show, at least for bright star photometry, that we think we can do just as well with CMOS, as well as the CCDs. Probably not better, the same precision we're getting. But there's a couple of extra advantages we get with a CMOS. Firstly, there's no shutter. So, the shutter is one of the things that we that would sometimes break, and you'd have to maintain. So not having a shutter is an advantage. The readout is very fast, so CCDs take a little bit of time to read out, because you're sort of reading the pixels out in series. But with a CMOS, you can read out all the pixels almost instantly. And then the other, the other advantage with that fast readout is, if you want, you can start trying to measure really bright stars. Because you could just bring your exposure time right down, and you won't saturate with short exposures. So, some people use CMOS for very fast imaging, in the sort of millisecond level, which you wouldn't be able to do with a CCD. So I think the future for photometry is CMOS. And in some ways, we might not have any choice, because some of the CCD manufacturers are just not producing CCDs anymore, because they're not being used for other industrial purposes. But so far, I would, yeah, the summary, so far, the CMOSes are looking really good for photometry.

Awesome. Yeah, I've burned up a few shutters in my day.

Yeah, haven't we?

So, I appreciate the opportunities to go shutterless. I did have another question, so, when you do your imaging, do you have scientists who are continuously monitoring through the night, or is the process so largely automated that you get up in the morning and have a look and see what you captured?

It's almost entirely automated, so we have usually one person who's doing what we call babysitting the telescope, which is normally just at the start of the end of the night, making sure that the dome opens and closes properly. But other than that, pretty much everything is automated, so we get all the images at the end of the night, and then we reduce them after the fact. Yeah, and with 12 telescopes, we get a lot of images. I mean, we probably probably take about 200GB of data every night, so that's the analysis as well has got to be automated, because it's just too much data to work on manually.

Yeah, I noticed that you have some citizen science opportunities listed on the website. Can you tell us a little bit about your citizen science program?

Yeah, so that is run by Sean O'Brien, who's also based at Belfast with me. And it's similar to Kepler and TESS had their own Planet Hunters programs, which is basically just getting members of the public, like yourselves, to look through all of our light curves and see if they think there's a transit there, because we have so much data. It's really too much for us to go through and eyeball ourselves and having members of the public look through the light curves is really valuable, because they can identify those candidates that we can then have a look at ourselves, see if we think they're real, and then push forward to the next stage of confirmation.

Okay, we'll post the link to that so if any of our listeners are interested and want to help you guys out, sort through some data, and basically help you discover another planet.

Let's see, did you have any more questions there, Mike?

Well, yeah, the news item about the potential Saturn-class planet around Alpha Centauri. I'm just curious whether NGTS is able or even expected to be able to find exomoons. Is that something that is in your data or in your future?

Oh, we don't really, we don't have the precision to detect an exomoon. But one of the projects we're really focused on is trying to detect longer period transiting giant planets. So typically, hot Jupiters were mentioned earlier, most of the transiting planets that we find are these, sort of, really short period, 10 days or less, giant planets. And we're trying to sort of push out using the combination of space-based photometry from tests and then ground-based follow-up with NGTS to get these longer period transiting planets, and that's what the conference we were in Albuquerque was all about, and while NGTS won't be able to detect any moons that will exist around these planets, these are the kind of regimes where we expect moons to become stable, because in these ultra-short period systems, the star's basically just gonna pull that moon off, and it's gonna have no chance of staying around. So we're not discovering exomoons, but we're potentially finding the planets, which will be the survey sample for future searches for exomones.

Yeah, so to actually detect the moon, you need you need really high precision, but we know that's possible now, certainly with the James Webb Space Telescope, has the position to do that. So I'd say it's probably only a matter of time. Maybe only a year or two before people actually find moons with JWST. That's definitely coming.

Hopefully it'll be around one of the discovers. That'll be really neat.

Awesome.

Okay, have you had any problems with Earth-based satellites affecting your data, specifically with the Starlink constellations, which are even over Peru, as we speak?

Yeah, so we do we see a lot of satellites in our images. When we make a movie over a night sky, with one telescope, for instance, you see satellites coming through all the time, and that's ramped up a lot in recent years, as you all know, I'm sure. We're quite good at filtering those things out. We actually had to do that, because we're located right next to the largest telescope in the world currently, the very large telescope, which is run by the European Southern Observatory. And although we have a fantastic dark sky, these guys have these huge lasers they fire into the air to create simulated stars, so they can correct their imaging. So even from the beginning, we had these bright lines for our images that we had to be quite good at automatically detectoring and filtering out. That same algorithm does a pretty good job at filtering out the satellites. But of course, it means that any star that that line goes across, we just lose that data. So we definitely lose data, but we've got reasonably good at filtering out, so at least it doesn't contaminate the data, we just lose data.

Okay. I know, Mike, you had a question for them about their live cameras?

Yeah, I noticed that the live links are all returning dead images. Is that something you guys can fix for us? I'd love to see your...

Yeah, that's on my to-do list. So we have that, so we put that on the web page, and we can all see it, because we have our permissions set, and we didn't realize it wasn't available publicly, so that's... thanks for that. We're gonna go and sort that out as soon as we can, and we'll actually let you know when it's done, and you can see our live sky images. But it's just a permission issue. We can see it and the telescopes are still there and work.

Excellent.

I surmised as much.

Okay, well, I really, I really want to thank you guys for being on the podcast. It was a pleasure to meet you and chat with you last night, and look forward to chatting with you again tomorrow tonight while you're down here in Trace Piedras. And fortunately, Mike is not going to be able to join us, but so, again, I want to thank you all for for appearing on our podcast.

Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure.

Yeah, thanks very much.

We want to thank all of our listeners for checking out the podcast. Be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and let us know what you'd like to hear more about. You can also check out our website at WildernessVagabonds.com for Mike's website, and Skylapser.com for my website. And, of course, you can go to NGTransits.com.org to check out the transits website for our guest. And if you'd like to help us out, you can buy us a coffee at [buymeacoffee.com/Skylapser](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://buymeacoffee.com/Skylapser). Our intro music is Fanfare for Space by Kevin McCloud from the YouTube Audio Library.

From the deep sage 9 Observatory. This is Jay Schaefer, and...