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## Starcast: March 1, 2026

**Hosts:** Jay Shaffer and Mike Lewinski 


**Jay Shaffer:** Welcome back to the Starcast for the week of March 1st, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. How are you doing, Mike? 

**Mike Lewinski:** I'm doing great, Jay. Thanks for having me. How are you doing? 

**Jay Shaffer:** Good. I can't beat the weather here for the first day of March.  We're coming in like a lamb, so... and so here we go. Mike, what's our space weather? Speaking of weather, what is our space weather looking like over the next couple of days? 

**Mike Lewinski:** Well, Jay, we had a forecast for a minor CME hitting the earth yesterday, and we did peak up around a 4 Kp. So there was some evidence of a CME from a magnetic filament that had erupted on February 25th. But the sun is relatively quiet. Sunspot 4380 poses a threat for M-class solar flares right now. It's one of just a handful of sunspots that have emerged over that eastern limb. And we have no equatorial coronal holes on the earth side of the sun at this moment. 

Our actual chance of an M-class flare stands around 25% for the next 2 days, and X-class flare chance drops down to 5%. So for mid-latitudes, active condition prediction from NOAA is around 35% chance and dropping from there. We have only a 1% chance of a severe geomagnetic storm. But if you're up at the higher latitudes, there is a 50% chance of a geomagnetic storm, severe geomagnetic storm today, dropping to 40% tomorrow. What's happening in the night sky this week? 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, the headliner is definitely the Total Lunar Eclipse hitting us on Tuesday morning. It's a set-your-alarm kind of event, because it coincides perfectly with the full moon, as do all for lunar eclipses. The absolute crest of the full moon is at 5:38 a.m. Central time in the United States on March 3rd. The real show of the lunar eclipse starts a bit earlier. So if you're awake around 3:50 a.m. Central Standard Time, you'll start seeing the moon creeping into the dark's umbral shadow. 

Then, from 5:04 to about 6:03 a.m. Central, we get that full blood moon total eclipse phase for about an hour. If you're on the East Coast, you might get short-changed since the moon will be setting before the show wraps up. But for those of us out here in the mountain and Pacific time zones, we're in the sweet spot to see the whole thing from start to finish. Mike and I are going to do a deep dive later on in the show on exactly how to capture this on camera without losing your mind. So, Mike, what's sitting at the top of your radar for space news this week? 

**Mike Lewinski:** Okay, the big news is that NASA is basically hitting the adjust button on the Artemis program. They're pivoting strategy quite a bit, pushing the next crewed lunar lander back to 2028, and actually sliding an entire new mission into the schedule. 

**Jay Shaffer:** So wait, what? Another mission? So Artemis III isn't the big moon landing anymore? 

**Mike Lewinski:** Exactly.  It's a bit of a throwback, actually. Artemis III is now reimagined as a dress rehearsal in Earth orbit, almost exactly like what Apollo 9 did back in the day. They'll be testing docking and life support systems without leaving our immediate neighborhood. The actual boots on the ground moment is getting bumped to Artemis IV. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is saying that this is all about standardization, basically getting a repeatable, once-a-year launch rhythm going. But a huge part of it is also just giving the landers more time. SpaceX is still working through those tricky Starship refueling tests, while Blue Origin is steady on the heels of their own flight readiness. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, that's a massive pivot. It sounds like a lot of moving parts are being realigned all at once. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Definitely. It feels like they're erring on the side of caution, especially after the technical hiccups and helium leaks that we've seen with Artemis II prep. They'd rather get it right than get it fast. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Makes sense. Safety first when you're headed to the moon. Now switching gears to something a bit further out, what's the latest in astronomy news? 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, very cool news out of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which just hit a major milestone. Their real-time discovery system is officially live, and it's already spitting out hundreds of thousands of scientific alerts in a single night. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Hundreds of thousands in one night? 

**Mike Lewinski:** It's wild. This thing has the world's largest digital camera, and once the full 10-year survey kicks off, they're expecting up to 7 million alerts every single night. The data is so massive, about 500 petabytes, that professional astronomers literally can't keep up.  So, they're calling for backup. Anyone listening can jump onto platforms like Zooniverse to help classify these cosmic events. You could literally be a person who flags a new asteroid or a dying star. 

**Jay Shaffer:** You know, I just might have to sign up for Zooniverse. But speaking of looking at the sky ourselves, we've got that lunar eclipse coming up. It's the last one for a couple years, so we need to talk shop about how we can actually catch this thing on camera. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Absolutely. It's such a one-shot deal. If you miss this window when the moon turns that deep blood red, you're waiting years for the next one. And really, they are surprisingly difficult to photograph. 

**Jay Shaffer:** No kidding. I still have war stories from our trip to Texas for the total solar eclipse, and the traffic, the clouds, the gear stress. But you've had some great luck with the last lunar event, haven't you? 

**Mike Lewinski:** I have. The last lunar event and solar eclipse two years ago in Texas—we went with a really dismal forecast. I think it was 75 to 85% cloud forecast, and somehow at totality, the clouds cleared, and we got a good view of it. The last lunar event was similar. It was completely cloudy and that was our forecast—like 90% clouds and snow. My partner woke me up, and there was a brief clearing for the duration of the totality. So, you just never know what's going to happen. Tell me what you're up to, Jay. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah. Well, you know, it's difficult. Part of the difficulty is that lighting change that always gets me. You go from the bright moon and then within just a few minutes, you're having to lengthen your exposure or widen your aperture. I'm looking at the charts and realize I'm going to be dragging myself out of bed at 3 a.m. just to get the tracking mount aligned. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, tell me about it. That's the part that people don't see—standing in the yard in your pajamas, shivering, nursing a lukewarm coffee. If you aren't out there an hour early or more to monitor your equipment, something will go wrong right at totality. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Exactly. So what exactly are you bringing out in the field this time to make that early wake-up call worth it? 

**Mike Lewinski:** So, Jay, I always treat these events as a "shoot 3 times or 4 times and hope for the best." I'll have the Seastar, my Sony A7R III mounted on a telescope with a Star Adventurer tracking mount, and a different telephoto lens on my a6300 for more manual shooting. My a6300 will do a wide field. I really like capturing the change from the bright blue into the pitch black at totality. 

I am also very interested in continuing experiments with tethered shooting—taking a laptop and connecting it with a USB cable directly to the camera. Now, instead of touching the camera dials to change exposure values, I can do it from the laptop. That means there's much less vibration. I've also learned to get my mount aligned 24 hours ahead of time if I can, since I need true polar alignment. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, so I'm pretty much very similar. I'll be using a Canon full-frame camera on my Sky-Watcher mount, which is an Alt-Azimuth mount, with a C90 90mm telescope as the lens. I'm going to try to have that set with Auto ISO to try to chase the exposure without me having to adjust it manually. I’m also going to be running the Seastar as an equatorial mount. 

One thing that's difficult with a Seastar is actually finding the moon. I go into stargazing mode, use the Sky Atlas to find something near the moon, have the telescope go to that, and then target the moon within the Star Atlas itself. Once it finds the moon, I switch back to lunar mode. For wide field, I'm using my T-Seq tracker with a Lumix G100 micro four-thirds camera and a 150mm lens. 

**Mike Lewinski:** It sounds like a management nightmare of cell phones. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, I’ll be running apps for the Canon camera, the Sky-Watcher mount, the T-Seq tracker, and the Seastar S50. So what about the weather factor? 

**Mike Lewinski:** I've been watching the weather for the last week. A week ago, they were predicting 65 to 70% chance of clouds. But our current forecast here in Crestone puts us between 15-20% chance of clouds at the eclipse window on Tuesday morning. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Well, it's always the Zen part of astronomy—accepting things you can't control, like weather. 

**Mike Lewinski:** Yeah. I want to mention a couple apps: The Photographer's Ephemeris for calculating rises/sets and Stellarium for planning. Stellarium lets you go forward and backward in time, and has the eclipse built right in. 

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, I use Sky Safari, StarWalk 2, and PhotoPills. At the end of the night, what are you hoping to get out of the eclipse? 

**Mike Lewinski:** I really want that one clean high-resolution shot of peak totality color and a smooth time-lapse. 

**Jay Shaffer:** If I can get a well-framed and well-exposed 7-shot sequence—from the start of the umbra through totality and back out—I'll be a happy camper.  Thanks to all our listeners. Check out our websites, wildernessvagabonds.com and skylapser.com. You can check out Mike's time lapses on the Mike Lewinski YouTube channel, and mine on the Skylapser YouTube channel.  From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer And Mike Lewinski, Wishing you all Clear skies!