## Starcast Meeting Transcript: January 25, 2026 **[Jay Shaffer]** Welcome to the Starcast for the week of January 25th, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer. And with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinsky. Howdy, Mike! **[Mike L.]** Howdy, Jay! **[Jay Shaffer]** So, it's been a of a week for space weather, so what's our space weather looking like over the next couple days? **[Mike L.]** Yeah, Jay, I think this is a good point to look back at last week's forecast. I'm just gonna play that clip. *(Last week's clip)*: Well, Jay, there's a couple sunspot groups with both Beta, delta magnetic fields that pose a threat of M-class flares. We're keeping an eye on Sunspot 4343 and 4341. Currently, our predicted chance of M-class flares is around 55% for the next few days, with a much lower chance of X-class players at around 5%. So, wouldn't you know it, 4341 erupted with an extremely powerful X1.9 flare just a few hours after that prediction that we had only a 5% chance. And that's how the odds go. Even 5% is going to pay out on occasion, and we really hit the jackpot this week. That eruption lasted for hours, and it was one of the fastest CMEs recorded, traveling at roughly 1,660 kilometers per second. Most of the time, CMEs take 3 to 4 days to reach Earth, but that one hit us in just 25 hours. And it was a whopper of a storm, lasting a full 3 days with the maximum G4 intensity of over 12 hours. So, onto our current space weather forecast. There are 9 sunspot groups facing the Earth right now, but they mostly have stable magnetic fields, and the chances of an eruption are pretty low. The current estimate for the next 48 hours is a 55% chance of an M-Class flare and a 10% chance of an X-class flare. Here at Mid-Latitudes, we have a 10-20% chance of active geomagnetic conditions over the next 48 hours and much diminished chances of anything greater than that. At higher latitudes, there is a 25% chance of a severe storm today dropping to 10% tomorrow. But again, the way that chances work, we can't discount any of that. By the way, that sunspot 4341 that unleashed the monster storm is one of the nine that is still facing Earth. But its magnetic field has stabilized, and over the next day, it is going to rotate away from the Earth. So, what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay? **[Jay Shaffer]** Okay, before that, speaking of monster storms, most of the U.S. was hit by a winter storm this week, and of course most of the U.S. was actually overcast, and so kind of missed out on that geomagnetic storm because of the clouds. But let's hope that it clears over the next week, and then we also can see the Northern lights. Well, this week we're approaching the first quarter moon; the moment of the first quarter moon will fall at 4:47 UTC on January 26, 2026. And that's about 9:47 PM Mountain Standard Time here on January 25th, tonight. A first quarter moon rises around noon, your local time, and it sets around midnight, so watch for the first quarter moon high in the sky at sundown. On Monday, the first quarter moon will lie near the famous Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, or M45. The Pleiades star cluster is in the constellation Taurus, the bull, and its brightest star, Aldebaran, is also nearby. Then on Tuesday, January 27th, the waxing Gibbous moon will slowly pass the Pleiades. Binoculars will help you catch the stars near the bright moon, and they'll be visible well past midnight. And also, for the 2nd time this month, the moon will reach perigee, its closest point to us in orbit. The perigee comes at 2200 hours UTC on Thursday, January 29th, 2026. And then the moon will be 227,341 miles or 365,871 kilometers away from Earth. And for us astronomy buffs, that's just over one light second away. So, Mike, what do you have for us in space news? **[Mike L.]** Astronomers are closely monitoring a newly discovered comet, comet C2026A1 MAPS, which is currently hurtling toward the inner solar system. First spotted on January 13th, 2026 by a team of astronomers using robotic telescopes in Chile, the comet is identified as a sun grazer from the Kreutz family. That's fragments of a massive comet that fragmented centuries ago. While currently faint and visible only through powerful telescopes, its early detection at a significant distance from the Sun suggests it has a substantial size, leading to optimistic predictions that it could become exceptionally bright as it approaches its perihelion. The comet is scheduled to make its closest approach to the Sun on April 4th and 5th of 2026, passing just 105,000 miles above the solar surface. That extreme proximity presents a high-stakes scenario. The sun's intense heat and gravitational pull could either vaporize the comet entirely or trigger a spectacular surge in brightness. If it survives the encounter, experts suggest C2026A1 could become visible to the naked eye, potentially reaching a brilliance that rivals Venus or even becomes visible in daylight. Observers in the Southern Hemisphere are expected to have the best views in the morning twilight through mid-April. So, Jay, what's our topic for today? **[Jay Shaffer]** Well, Mike, today's episode is brought to you by the letter M. Our listeners have probably noticed that a lot of the space objects that we talk about are named with an M and a number. For example, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, and M45, the Pleiades. So, speaking of M's, Mike… What does the mysterious M mean? **[Mike L.]** Jay, the letter M is a reference to the French astronomer Charles Messier. And before we get into the deep sky objects, or DSOs that he cataloged, we should say a few things about the man that King Louis XV nicknamed the Ferret of Comets. You see, what he really loved was discovering new comets, and the objects that he catalogued—nebulae, clusters, and galaxies—were all faint, fuzzy distractions from that task. He actually discovered 13 comets, but that's not what he's best known for. So, Jay, can you tell us a little bit more about his interest in astronomy and his special fascination with comets? **[Jay Shaffer]** Yeah, so Messier's interest in astronomy was first piqued by the appearance of a great six-tailed comet in 1744, as well as an annular solar eclipse visible from his hometown in Badonviller, France in July 1748. And that comet was really spectacular and intriguing. Today, we've designated that as C1743X1. It reached an apparent magnitude of minus 7 and was visible in the daytime. And as it moved away from the sun, it sprouted multiple tails, something that has puzzled astronomers for years. And we recently saw with the X1 comet this year that it also had multiple tails. One of the most popular theories is that the fan of tails was generated by up to 3 active sources in the cometary nucleus that were repeatedly exposed to solar radiation as the nucleus rotated. So, if this is possible, comets might have any number of tails. By the way, C1743X1 is believed to have appeared before in the year 715, 1058 and 1402, and is expected to return to the inner solar system again here in 2097. I probably won't see it, but you might, Mike. So, Mike, Charles Messier became a little obsessed with finding more comets after seeing this fantastic six-tailed apparition. So, to do so, he needed to rule out some pesky impostors, and these are the so-called Messier objects. Tell us more about them. **[Mike L.]** Jay, when you're hunting for comets with a telescope, you may spot some false positives. Charles Messier was using a 4-inch refractor, and the list of objects that he compiled is constrained to things that were visible from his observatory in France. One night, he stumbled onto the Crab Nebula and was very excited because he believed he'd discovered a new comet. Once he realized his error, he made a note of its position so he wouldn't be fooled again. And he decided eventually to catalog deep space objects that might be mistaken as comets to help other astronomers. With repeated observations over a day or two, it becomes easy to tell them apart. Comets are inside our solar system and have an apparent motion compared to background stars that is discernible over a time span of hours or days. By comparison, the deep sky objects are fixed in place over centuries, at least from our perspective. So these objects that appear in the Messier catalog fall into five broad categories that include a wide variety of phenomena: diffuse nebulae, planetary nebulae, open clusters, globular clusters, and galaxies. Messier's list was first published in 1774 and at that time contained just 45 unnumbered objects. Of those, 18 were discovered by Messier; the rest have been previously observed by other astronomers. The 110th object was only added in 1967, long after his death. By the way, Messier's list was not the first list of deep sky objects. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Hodierna cataloged some 40 deep sky objects that he published in 1654, but it's highly unlikely that Messier knew of this. So, Jay, let's break this list down for our listeners. What are the diffuse nebulae and planetary nebulae? **[Jay Shaffer]** Okay, so originally the term nebula was applied to any diffuse astronomical object, including galaxies. And the Andromeda Galaxy was once referred to as the Andromeda Nebula before the true nature of galaxies was discovered not until the earliest 20th century, two centuries after Messier, by astronomers including Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble, and others. Today, the term describes regions of luminescent dust. The diffuse nebulae are the most common type; they're very large and they lack clear boundaries. Of these, emission nebulae emit light from their ionized gases, much like the Northern lights would be or a tail from a meteor. While Reflection Nebulae are illuminated by nearby stars. And there's also Dark Nebula, which are just dark dust clouds which lack a nearby star's illumination but which block enough light from the objects appearing behind them so that we can detect them. Notable entries of diffuse nebula in the Messier list include the first one, M1, the crab nebula; M16, the Eagle Nebula, which has the Pillars of Creation in it; and M42, the Great Orion Nebula. The other kind of Nebula cataloged by Messier are Planetary Nebulae, and these are formed at the end of a mid-mass star's life when it expels its outer layer in a shell of luminous gas. The aging star remains as a white dwarf in the center of the nebula, and this is also likely to be the fate of our sun some 7.5 billion years from now. Notable planetary nebula in the Messier list include M27, the Dumbbell Nebula; M57, the Ring Nebula; and M97, the Owl Nebula. So, Mike, can you tell us about these two types of clusters found in the list? **[Mike L.]** Yes, Jay. First off are the open clusters, and we're most familiar with M45, the Pleiades, which was mentioned earlier in our night sky tour for the week. The moon will be passing nearby this open cluster this week. Open clusters are groups of stars that are formed from the same cloud of dust and gas and are roughly the same age. Open clusters range in size from just tens of stars to a few thousand. There are more than 1,000 identified open clusters in the Milky Way, and that's very likely just a fraction of the total. Open clusters are only loosely bound by gravity, and they can be disrupted and pulled apart by encounters with the gravitational fields of other bodies. Besides M45, the other open cluster that many of our listeners will know about is M44, the Beehive cluster. By contrast, globular clusters contain tens of thousands or millions of stars and are much more tightly bound in a spheroid shape by their own gravity. Notable entries on the Messier list include M13, the Great Hercules Cluster and M22, the great Sagittarius Cluster. So, Jay, why don't you wrap up this tour of the Messier types with the galaxies that are on the list? **[Jay Shaffer]** Yeah, our listeners surely understand what a galaxy is, so I'll just highlight some of the notable entries. At the top of the list, our nearest galactic neighbor is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, which we mentioned earlier was originally called the Andromeda Nebula, and it's one of the most prominent naked-eye DSOs on the Messier list. And we also like observing M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, M65 and M66, the Leo triplet, M81, Bode's Galaxy, and M94, the Cat's Eye Galaxy. M101 is the Pinwheel Galaxy, and M104 is the famous Sombrero Galaxy. So Mike, what would it take to view all the Messier objects in one night? And has anyone ever done that? **[Mike L.]** It is possible, Jay, but it takes good positioning, good timing, and endurance. That's called a Messier Marathon. You have to be in the Northern Hemisphere to do it, and it helps if you're around the 25th parallel north. In the United States, that puts you in Key Largo or Hawaii. The end of March or early April, around the new moon, is the best time to do this—usually the new moon that is closest to the equinox. You're going to be up all night for this attempt, starting with objects that are setting low in the western sky as night falls and working your way across the sky until you're straining to round up the marathon with objects rising in the east just before dawn. If you can log more than 100, you've had a successful marathon. The more crowded parts of the sky, such as the Virgo cluster and the Milky Way core, are going to require extra time and effort. If any of our listeners have done this or plan to do it, we'd love to hear about your experiences. So I think this about wraps up the quick tour of Messier object types. Do you have any closing thoughts, Jay? **[Jay Shaffer]** Yeah, I just have one… I should note that there are a couple other catalogs out there besides the Messier catalog. There's the New General Catalog, which was compiled by John Louis Emil Dreyer in 1888. The NGC was the first attempt at truly comprehensive professional lists and expanded the works of William and John Herschel. And so, it has quite a few more objects than the Messier list being later. It approximately describes 7,840 objects, and it includes everything from massive galaxies to faint tiny clusters. And it is the standard catalog used by amateur and professional astronomers today. You should note that almost every Messier object also has an NGC number. For example, Crab Nebula M1 is also NGC 1952. And there's another catalog out there as well; it's called the IC, sometimes confused with the IGC. And this was published as two supplements to the NGC in 1895 and in 1908 to keep up with new discoveries made via photography. So, it adds another 5,386 objects to the NGC catalog. And this includes some of the much fainter and more difficult to see NGC objects, and many IC objects require large telescopes or long exposure photography to detect. So that's kind of how we describe all these objects and the night sky. And so, we want to thank all of our listeners for checking out the podcast. Please 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 websites: Mike's is Wildernessvagabonds.com and mine is Skylapser.com. And if you want to see Mike and my time lapses from the week when we captured some of the Northern lights, you can see Mike's on Mike Lewinsky's YouTube channel, and you can check out my YouTube channel also, which is named Skylapser. The intro music for this podcast is Fanfare for Space by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer, and… Mike Lewinski wishing you all clear skies. .