##Transcript: Starcast for December 7th, 2025


**Jay Shaffer**
 Welcome to the Starcast for the week of December 7th, 2025. I'm your host, **Jay Shaffer**. And with me is my co-host, **Mike Lewinski**. Good morning, Mike.

**Mike Lewinski**
Good morning, Jay. It's great to be here.

**Jay Shaffer**
I hear there's a lot going on in space weather. What's that looking like over the next couple days?

**Mike Lewinski**
Yes, we have a really interesting forecast. Officially, NOAA is advising of the possibility of a G2 to G3 level storm on the 9th of December, which is this coming Monday. That is expected—sorry, actually, I think the 9th is Tuesday. Expected to arrive midday on Monday and going through Tuesday. So, we have a couple interesting sunspots right now. There is a giant group of sunspots that is hanging out in the southern hemisphere. It is a cluster denoted 4294 to 4296. And earlier in the week, SpaceWeather.com had an illustration showing the relative size to the sunspot group that produced the **Carrington event**. And this is really quite comparable. And everybody's been kind of watching this group in the Southern Hemisphere. And boom, yesterday we got hit by something in the northern Hemisphere, a sunspot 4299 erupted and produced an M8-class solar flare, almost an **X flare**, aimed directly at Earth. It did cause a shortwave radio blackout over the Pacific Ocean. And it also hurled a **CME** directly at us that is expected to arrive sometime on December 9th. So, we are absolutely watching this. The official forecast prediction is that we have a **65% chance of an M-class flare** for the next 48 hours and a **15% chance of an X-class flare**. Now, for geomagnetic storms here at mid-latitudes, they're predicting a **40% chance of active**, **25% chance of minor**, and a **5% chance of severe storm**. And that is a forecast from yesterday that may be updated with different probabilities today. Up at high latitudes, we get up to a **65% chance of a severe storm**, so the next couple days are going to be interesting. What's up in the night sky this week, Jay?

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, before I get into that, just could **Mike Lewinski** elucidate a little bit for our readers, briefly, and tell them what the Carrington event is, for those that may not know?

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah, the Carrington event is probably the strongest recorded in modern times solar storm. It happened that this was in September of **1859**. And astronomer, **Richard Carrington**, was making drawing of sunspots at the time that the solar flare erupted. And this was truly a giant eruption. It caused **severe damage to telegraph stations on Earth**. So, in the 1850s, 1860s, we hadn't yet gotten to an electrical grid. But we did have some telegraph wires, and the current that was generated by the geomagnetic storm was picked up by these very long pieces of copper, and so much so that some telegraph stations had **fires that broke out**. Operators were advised to disconnect their sets, and some operators actually observe that there was enough current on the wire that they could still send messages to other stations even **without their batteries connected**. And as far as the humans observations were concerned, there's a sort of famous story that there were some gold miners here in the Rocky Mountains who heard the birds; they woke up in the middle of the night, they started fixing their breakfast because it was dawn. No, it was like 1 o'clock in the morning, and the birds were awoken because the sky was so brilliant that everybody thought the sun was rising. The birds and the miners. So, it was a really severe storm that had it occurred in modern times with our modern electrical grid, the potential for widespread fires and other disruption, blowing out of transformers, would be much more dramatic. And it really is only a question of when that happens, because we know that these things recur periodically going back into prehistoric eras, when we can see the impacts in tree rings and other geological records.

**Jay Shaffer**
Mm-hmm. Fascinating. So, tonight is, if you live near the latitude of 40 degrees north, kind of the mid-latitudes, will be the **earliest sunset of the year**. And this is a lot of people would think that this would, the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise would be during the equinox. But due to the various factors and the tilt of the earth and stuff like that, we actually have the earliest sunset before the equinox, and we have the latest sunrise after the equinox, so that's just kind of a fascinating little fact for tonight. And we're just past the full moon, and then of course, coming up this Thursday, December, the **11th**, will bring the **last quarter moon**, and it will be exactly full at 3:52 PM Eastern Standard Time. And when the moon finally rises at midnight, it will actually be a bit past the last quarter phase. And as for the planets, in December, **Jupiter is kind of the bright star**, or the bright planet. It's quite bright, and you should be able to see it near the moon and the constellation **Gemini**, which includes the two stars, Castor and Pollux with the Gemini twins. And so when we speak about Gemini, and finally, next Saturday is when the **Geminid meteor shower** is expected to peak. The Geminids are expected to reach maximum activity on the night of **December 13th and 14th**. And this year's viewing should be **excellent** with the raining crescent moon rising several hours after midnight. And of course, after this episode, we're going to be taking a little bit of a holiday break, but you can always keep up with space weather at **spaceweather.com** and kind of look at what's happening in the night sky at the calendar on **earthsky.org**. Mike, what do you have for us in space news for today?

**Mike Lewinski**
Jay, there are new analysis of pristine samples from the **asteroid Bennu** that have been returned by NASA's **OSIRIS-REx**. And these continue to confirm that the early solar system was richly stacked with the **chemical precursors of life** as well as evidence of the environments needed for their synthesis. Scientists confirmed the presence of **sugars** essential for biology, including the 5-carbon sugar **ribose**, and for the first time in an extraterrestrial sample, **glucose**, suggesting all the components of **RNA** are present, lending support to our **RNA world hypothesis**. Besides the sugars and the full set of 5 nucleobases, samples reveal an abundance of **complex organic molecules**, including a tentative detection of the amino acid **tryptophan**. Crucially, this material also holds fingerprints of a **sustained wet history**. Analysts identified 11 different minerals known as **evaporites**, including **halite** and **silvite**, that formed as ancient, salt-rich water slowly evaporated over long periods, indicating that Bennu's parent body hosted multiple distinct aqueous alteration events, producing a variety of organic chemistries within the rock. Further highlighting the unique nature of Bennu's history, researchers also discovered a mysterious nitrogen and oxygen-rich **gum-like substance**. This type of polymer has never before been seen in a space rock. This "space gum" likely formed during the **earliest heating of the parent asteroid**, suggesting the creation predated the widespread watery alteration and offering us a glimpse into the very first chemical changes in our solar system. This material also revealed profound information about the birth environment. These samples contained an unexpectedly high abundance of **dust produced by ancient supernova explosions**, approximately 6 times more than any other material that we've studied. This finding suggests that Bennu's parent body formed in a unique, enriched region of the protoplanetary disk and ultimately position the asteroid as an unparalleled time capsule, showing us the ingredients and the wet active conditions that may have helped to seed life on early Earth. So, Jay, as we go into our holiday break, we thought we would lighten it up a little and talk about some of our favorite toys or gadgets, or as we tell our spouses, essential equipment for **astrophotography**. I've recently acquired a **sky quality meter**. This is part of the Crestone Dark Sky Foundation's efforts to document and preserve the dark skies here in Crestone. The sky quality meter is a device approximately the size of a pack of playing cards, maybe a little bit bigger. And I have it mounted now on my roof. It is in a white PVC tube that has a piece of clear plexiglass on one end, and the sky quality meter points straight up. I have the software configured to start logging when the value, which is measured as **magnitudes per square arc second**, increases above 8. So, higher values are darker, and this particular instrument, which is made by a company out of Canada called **Unihedron**, has pretty much an effective maximum reading around **21.5**. Skies that are much darker than 21.5, there's enough uncertainty with the instrument that we don't trust the measurements much over that. And I do read up to about a 22 reading with the SQM. 22.04 magnitudes per second squared was about the best reading I've had since I turned the device on. And what we're really looking at and trying to measure here is the amount of **sky glow**. And we differentiate sky glow and **air glow**. **Sky glow** is caused by reflected light from human light pollution sources, whereas **air glow** is the Earth's natural photochemistry that's happening in the very upper atmosphere. And of course, this particular instrument does not overly distinguish between air glow and sky glow. In other words, when we have a good air glow display, I'm going to record a lower SQM value. But by continuously recording every night of the year, I get the opportunity to establish what a baseline is on a very dark night with no air glow. And then, if there is a deviation from that, I can of course check my time lapses and look for evidence that there is air glow or Northern lights that are impacting my measurements. So, I'm kind of excited about this. I've only had it up for a few weeks, and I'm still watching it closely. I haven't started contributing my data to some of the citizen science projects that exist, but I do expect that within another week or two, I will be ready to start submitting my data. So, Jay, what kind of gadgets are you playing with?

**Jay Shaffer**
Thanks, Mike. I'll brag for just a minute on a bargain lens that I picked up for time-lapse photography. I picked up the **Seven Artisans 14mm f2.8 lens** as a Black Friday special for $154, and this is with the Canon mount for my Canon camera. And this lens lists normally for about $196 and it comes in Canon, Sony, and Nikon mounts. And it's a great little manual lens, really well suited towards night astrophotography. It's **wide angle**, it has a **wide aperture**, and the **chromatic aberration is not too bad** on it. And for the money, I think it's a great lens, and if you're looking for a good lens for time-lapse night photography, and you don't have much in the way of a budget, check out the **7 Artisans 14mm f2.8 full-frame lens**. They also have an APS-C version if your camera has a crop-free sensor. And I'm also kind of excited about a new little **star tracker** I got from Alibaba, from a company called **T-Seek**, for $75. So, star trackers are basically—they're not really tracking a star. In other words, you don't say, look at Sirius and track it. These are actually little rotators that move your camera at the **same speed of the Earth's apparent rotation** called **sidereal speed**. And so, these little devices is that you could basically take them and put them on a tripod, and you point them toward the North Pole so that it rotates along the Earth's axis, or in sympathy with the Earth's axis, and allows you to take **long exposure photographs**. So, like, if you want to get the **Milky Way without star trailing**, or you want to image something in the night sky, a deep space object or something with just your DSLR-type camera or your camera and a lens, then you can use these little star trackers, and they will allow you to basically kind of lock on to your target, at least for a reasonable period of time, so you can get an exposure with your camera. And so there's been different star trackers on the market. There's one called the **Star Adventurer** from **Sky Watcher**, and then there's another one from a company called **Move Shoot Move**. And the **Star Adventurer** is kind of the OG Star Tracker. It's pretty heavy, and it has a lot of features, and it does have an app, and it's kind of semi-smart, and but it retails for about $330, $329 sometimes, so you can find it for that. And the kind of advantages of these is you could throw them in your backpack instead of throwing in a heavy, heavy telescope mount, and if you were going to a remote location, you could use them to kind of track the stars and get some nice astrophotography. And then the **Move Shoot Move Nomad** was kind of a smaller version of the Star Adventurer. It had many of the same features, and then it had where you could mount a laser pointer to it so that you could use that to polar align it with. And it was kind of the go-to backpacking star tracker. And it cost about $285, so a little bit less than the Star Adventurer, and it was a little bit lighter and more portable. And so, a lot of people were buying that. And then I saw on the internet, there were, on a YouTube video, this **T-Seek star tracker**, and this is basically a almost a clone of the Move Shoot Move Nomad in that it has most, if not all, of the same features as the Move Shoot Move Nomad. It has its own little **laser pointer built into the case** of it, and it allows you to adjust the speeds between **sidereal speed** and **lunar speed**, **solar speed**, and it allows you to change the hemisphere, so you can do star tracking in the southern or northern hemisphere. And it also has a **Wi-Fi** that you can basically log onto it, and it has kind of a built-in app. And the only downside I've found with it so far is that it's all in **Chinese**. The manual is in Chinese, the app is in Chinese, and all the tutorials are in Chinese, and so I had to use **Google Translate** to translate the manual to English. And then the app and the GUI on the app was also in Chinese, and then I just basically took a picture of that and then used **Google Image Translate**, and so now I'm able—I basically have a little reference that I look on my phone to what all the buttons actually do on the app. And so, great little star tracker, and I got that for **$75** on sale. And it goes for about $85 normally. I think I saw that it was going on Christmas sale again for $75 this week, and that's on Alibaba. So, since we're kind of nearing the holidays, and we're kind of can make a little wish list, what would be your items that you would suggest for people that want to buy themselves or others an astrophotography gift or other essential equipment for under $100? What would you suggest, Mike?

**Mike Lewinski**
Jay, first I want to just back up to the **Star Adventurer**, because that is the tracking mount that I have. And I have an older version that does not have an app, it just has a dial on it that allows me to choose the star tracking, sun tracking, moon tracking. It also features some time-lapse modes, so I can orient it and pan horizontally, if I wish. And just a couple notes about this. My original intention when I bought it was not to increase the exposure duration for star photography, but to **track the moon during a lunar eclipse**. And what I've learned over a couple years now, a couple things that I've learned that are important. The first is that, especially if the eclipse occurs very early in the evening, it may be difficult to get that **polar alignment** set up ahead of time. I've had the experience of the eclipses beginning and there's clouds in the north, and it has been cloudy since the sunset. It may be clear where the moon is traveling, but I can't find **Polaris**. And I've had to just guess and do my best, using a compass, and hoping that I'm close enough. It really does require, with the Star Adventurer, a combination of correct polar alignment, level, and having the latitude orientation correctly dialed in. There is a marker on it that lets me fix my latitude, and then the last piece is the **balance**, and I got the photo kit. It has a weighted arm, and I can adjust where that weight is. And so, what I've learned is, if I want to do an event like a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse, it is best to **set up, if possible, a whole day ahead of time, and run it through a test**. Get my camera out there tracking the night before the eclipse so that I can fine-tune the balance and fine-tune the level and orientation, and then leave the tripod right where it is so that when the time comes, I can be reasonably certain that I am all set up. And it's a fun little device. I would much prefer the Move Shoot Move or T-Seek if I was going to backpack. This would probably add **15 to 20 pounds** in my backpack. So, I probably wouldn't take my Star Adventurer out backpacking.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, and that's been almost replaced by the S50. The, is that you have for another third the price, you get the full-blown telescope.

**Mike Lewinski**
That's right, that's right. So as far as other essential equipment goes, under $100 for anybody who's interested in astronomy, start with a pair of **binoculars**. We'll include a link to a review at space.com for a pair of Celestron binoculars. These are **12x60**, which are a little big in terms of it's going to be hard to hold them steady enough. So if you do buy binoculars as a gift for someone, you might also include the **telescope mount** for these particular binoculars. I've got a pair of 12x50s, and I have a telescope mount for it, and if I'm going to, say, observe a comet, I will mount the binoculars on my tripod, and it's just a great way to get started with visual astronomy. Other items, something that is very inexpensive, and can be very helpful are **star wheels**. In fact, there are printable star wheels that you can make yourself at no cost, but you can pick up an inexpensive one for $10. I seem to recall that the gift shop down at the Great Sand Dunes National Park sells them. They have a lot of really cool astronomy-related gifts, so if you happen to be in this area, you can get puzzles and t-shirts and books and other items that are useful for observation. And the last piece that I will just mention as something that somebody who's maybe making time lapses, there are some inexpensive **360 degree tripod, egg timer style, mounts** that allow you to do a **panning time lapse**. And this is good day and night. I'm looking at one right now that will include a link that's about $30. You can screw this onto your tripod, and then you mount your camera on it, and you set intervals, and whether you want to do a full 360 degree rotation, or you want to pan back and forth, basically the same function that I've got in my Star Adventurer to do a panning time lapse, especially in the summertime, and I know you've done these, Jay, where you pan and follow the **Milky Way** as it travels across the night sky. I think that's an especially fun use for one of these little $30 timers.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, have you found one that does anti-clockwise? Because I've always the cheap ones are always clockwise, which is great for star tracking. But sometimes in a landscape, you want to do a pan of the plows or something during the daytime, is that you want to go anti-clockwise and I had a hard time finding a cheap one of those that does anti-clockwise.

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah, I know that this one will rotate back and forth and allows you to select the angle, whether or not you can start it and have it go anti-clockwise 360 degrees, I can't tell from reading the directions. Like I say, with the Star Adventurer, that's the one I'm using, and it's got some adjustments for it, so I can do that if I want to.

**Jay Shaffer**
Okay.

**Mike Lewinski**
And I think that's actually, you mentioned Southern Hemisphere, that's the toggle on the Star Adventurer. If I toggle to southern hemisphere, I'm going to rotate the other direction.

**Jay Shaffer**
Right, exactly.

**Mike Lewinski**
So, what else have you got in your goodie bag, Jay?

**Jay Shaffer**
I'm just thinking, when I go out to do a time lapse, especially this time of year, is that I'm not just taking out the tripod and the camera. And I do want to emphasize that, if you don't have a **tripod**, you need to get one. And that's probably the most important piece of equipment that you can have for astrophotography is a tripod. And you can definitely get some of these for **under $100**, and I'm always keeping an eye out at **thrift stores**, and it's seldom that I will go into a thrift store and not see an old discarded tripod, or a new discarded tripod, because some frustrated photographer has donated to the thrift store. And often these are missing the camera plates, but you can either fabricate them or sometimes order them, and so it's always, so first and foremost is, if you don't have a tripod, you need to get a tripod.

**Mike Lewinski**
Can I interrupt right there, Jay? The **heavier, the better**, if you're going to be doing a long-term time lapse. If you're backpacking, obviously a nice light, carbon fiber tripod is good to have, but if you're just putting this out outside next to your house, a heavy tripod is really desirable. If there's any, obviously you can wait down any tripod, but I find that using a nice, heavy, sturdy tripod gives me really a feeling of stability and safety for my expensive camera gear.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, and that's what you usually see at the thrift stores. It's the old, clunky ones, the big ones that aren't for sexy carbon fiber, and so that's always a very important. And then also very important is, I think, is a **rain cover**. And especially, like, these last few, over the last couple weeks, we've been having really heavy frost. And so I've been putting the camera out there, and I definitely have the rain cover on it, and I'll come out there, and that whole rain cover is either completely soaked on the outside with dew or completely encrusted with frost. And so, and that means that that frost and that dew is not on my camera. So, and there's a company called **Novo** that makes, and we'll include a link that makes a really nice little rain covers, nylon rain covers for various sizes of cameras and lenses, and that's definitely a must-have, and they're generally **under $20**, or around the $20 range. And then, again, going back to the company **Move**, they have a nice little **dew heater**. And this is like a little strap that has a **heating element** on it, and a USB cable that you wrap around your lens and that keeps the dew from, or the frost from forming on near the surface of your lens. And I actually had one fall off the other night, and basically it ruined my time lapse because frost formed on the lens. And so, having a dew heater is also a very important thing to have for shooting nighttime lapses, and you can get one of these, a really nice one for, I think it's like **$22**, and it has different heat settings, and it fits most lenses, and that's another one that I would really recommend. Next thing, of course, is having a **red headlamp** in, having those camping headlamps and making sure that you get one that has the **red bulb** on it so that you **don't ruin your night vision**. And especially if you're going to an astro party or, or you're with other photographers and stuff like that, it's just plain courteous not to have a red headlamp rather than a white headlamp and then.

**Mike Lewinski**
Can I interrupt there, Jay? Just be a little cautious. Some that are advertised as having red are actually **flashing red** for, like, sort of a distress signal. I bought a couple over the years that got them home and tried them out and realized that there is no solid, steady red light. It is only a flashing red light, so just look for something that is actually advertised for **astronomical use**, if possible.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, definitely, and yeah. And there's many of them out there, and they're super cheap ones, and then there's kind of mid-priced, and then there's ridiculously expensive $80, $85 ones. And again, I was going to include a link to one on Move Shoot Move that is specifically oriented for astrophotography. And then the final thing, which is not so much necessary, but it's kind of fun to have is a **high-powered laser pointer**. And the main reason I like having this is, like, when I'm going out with you and GAC or some other astrophotographers and we're talking about where targets are and stuff like that, or if I'm having a workshop and showing somebody about night photography or just even with the grandkids, showing them the night sky, is I can use this laser pointer to **point out objects in the night sky**, and you can point toward **Polaris**, or show somebody how the line goes between the Big Dipper and Polaris and that sort of thing. So, it's not an essential, per se, but it's one of my fun toys, and if you have a cat, it makes it even more fun.

**Mike Lewinski**
The last star party that we had here in Crestone, actually the last two star parties, it came in very handy, where I had located an object that other people with telescopes were struggling to locate. During the last one, it was kind of common, and I had managed to dial it in with my small telescope, and there were some folks who had larger telescopes that were struggling to find it, because their field of view relative to mine. And so what I did then was I just held that star pointer, or that laser pointer, on my telescope body so that I could see it through my lens and see that I was pointed directly at that, and that really helped them dial theirs in. So, a non-obvious use that really sped things, sped up the process for target acquisition.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, and like, the huge the big observatories, like, the Palomar and all those and all those on Mauna Kea, they actually use these **high-powered green lasers** to do a **sky evaluation** before they target anything in space, and so that they basically shoot up a laser through the atmosphere and are able to kind of look at that. The laser reflection and figure out what is going on in the atmosphere and compensate for that with their telescope for their observing on a particular night, so lasers. Okay, so we'll add our non-Bezos links to the mentioned products in the description. And we want to thank all of our listeners for checking out this 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 individual websites, **WildernessVagabonds.com** for **Mike Lewinski** and **Skylapser.com** for **Jay Shaffer**. And if you'd like to help us out, you can buy us a coffee at **[buymeacoffee.com/skylapser](https://buymeacoffee.com/skylapser)**. I would really like a double espresso. And the intro music is Fanfare for Space by Kevin McLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage Nine Observatory, this is **Jay Shaffer** and **Mike Lewinski**. Wishing you all happy holidays. A happy new year and clear skies.