### **Deep Sage 9 StarCast: International Dark Sky Week Special** **Date:** April 12, 2026 **Hosts:** Jay Shaffer and Mike Lewinski --- **Jay Shaffer:** Welcome back to the StarCast for the week of April 12, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. Uh, you're up there in Denver this week and how's things up there in the noise and the bright lights? **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, it's noisy and bright up here, Jay. So I am heading home this afternoon, and I'm really looking forward to getting back to the San Luis Valley and having some dark skies tonight. **Jay Shaffer:** Great. And so, Mike, what's our space weather looking like for over the next couple of days? **Mike Lewinski:** Well, Jay, it's pretty calm right now. There are 5 sunspots facing the earth, and 4409 has a beta delta magnetic field with just a 5% chance we might see an M flare from it before it disappears over the sun's limb in the next day—it is turning away from the earth. The other four sunspots are all pretty stable magnetic fields. We have just a 1% chance of an X flare over the next 48 hours. Now, the sun is leaking solar wind from many small holes, and the solar wind speed is currently at 560 kilometers per second. So, uh, NOAA does estimate we have a 35% chance of active geomagnetic conditions here at mid-latitudes today. That drops down to 30% tomorrow. But at high latitudes, there's a 55% chance of severe conditions dropping to 45% tomorrow. So what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay? **Jay Shaffer:** Well, for planetary observers, Jupiter is still high in the sky, and it's standing bright there in the constellation Gemini, and it's perfect for telescope viewing because it's up in the early evening, and uh… and it's up there until about, uh, it sets around 2 a.m. And, uh, Venus is the evening star right now, and it's really, uh, super brilliant to the west, moving through Taurus and toward the Pleiades, and it sets relatively early. And I actually had some people on my group here in Taos going, "What was that bright, bright light that set just after sunset?" And had to explain to them that, yeah, Venus is super bright this time of year. Um, and we're approaching the new moon here on April 17th, and so that makes this the golden week for deep sky imaging and dark sky observation. I've been looking forward to this week for quite a while, and so this is going to be a really good week for getting out there and catching the deep sky imaging and just doing some nice dark sky observation. And of course, we've got the Lyrid meteor shower coming up soon. It's going to peak on the 22nd, and I'm sure we'll hype that up a little bit more next week. But since the moon will be just approaching first quarter at the peak, it's going to be a prime year for observing the Lyrids. And so I'm really excited to get out there and hopefully, Mike, you'll have your all-sky camera up and running for that. And then we got a couple other things, a comet C 2026 A1 MAPS was supposed to be, you know, a sun-grazing comet and everybody was really excited about it. Unfortunately, it disintegrated as it swung around the sun last week, leaving behind only a dispersing cloud of dust. And that dispersing cloud of dust has been picked up on the CCOR-1 instrument, which is the, uh, instrument that looks at the sun, the corona of the sun, and that's just basically a virtual eclipse instrument, and so that way we can see the solar flares and any kind of near-sun objects. And so that's becoming a topic of interest for observers that the dust cloud is so bright. Um, and then the good news in comets is that the comet C2025 R3 PanSTARRS is currently picking up the slack and is a much better target for this week. It's headed toward our own… its own perihelion on April 19th and it is becoming a promising object in the pre-dawn sky. It's down there around magnitude 7 or 8 right now, and so that's observable with a small telescope or binoculars, and so if you're up early, look east and you should be able to see the, uh, comet. And so that's kind of what's happening in the night sky. I did—Mike and I both caught a pretty significant fireball meteor last week and reported that to, uh, the American Meteor Society, and so that was pretty exciting. So we're looking forward to the meteor shower, and uh… so, Mike! What do you have for us in space news? **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, Jay, before we leave the meteor shower, I should mention that I am headed to the San Rafael Swell area probably a week from today. I have a week vacation planned around Lyrid meteors. And so I plan to be camping out in the desert around the San Rafael Swell for the meteor shower. I may or may not be here for the next two Sundays. I will keep you posted, and we may have to adjust our recording schedule a little. But I'm very excited for both the Lyrid meteors and the comet observation that I may get out there in the darker desert. So in space news, we have some incredible visuals now from the Artemis 2 mission, which splashed down on Friday, April 10th near San Diego. It was a perfect splashdown. We held our breath, you know, for both the takeoff and the landing. There's, you know, a lot of trauma in my generation from the Challenger explosion. So you know, I know people who didn't watch it live, who didn't want to risk the fact that they might see the catastrophe, and so they waited to watch the replay. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, I was kind of the same way. And when they were cutting to the, you know, classroom for the kids watching live, I was like, oh, biting my heels. **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah. Can we put that on a maybe a 5 min delay? So the crew are back on solid ground now, and Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen have given us a treasure trove of imagery. NASA just released a curated gallery of high-res photos taken during their lunar flyby on April 6. This is more than 10,000 images, including handheld shots of the Vavilov crater and some hauntingly beautiful Earth-set photos, where our blue marble appears to sink behind the lunar limb, as well as some photos of the Milky Way that are just stunning. And one of the most unique captures was actually a solar eclipse—while we were looking up from Earth back in 2024, these astronauts got to see the moon's shadow from the other side. You can see the full gallery at a link that will be provided in our show notes. It's a literal perspective shift for humanity. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and of course there's photographers in the photography community—it was duly noted that they were using Nikon cameras, much to the consternation of Sony and Canon people. And then they had iPhones. And it's also important to note that these photos are, you know, they're owned by NASA and in that respect, that means that they are owned by you and I as taxpayers. And so, all of that NASA imagery is available to us to show and look at, and so that's, I think, a very important thing. **Mike Lewinski:** Yes, it is, and I, you know, in addition to monitoring their news releases and website, you know, follow them on Flickr, because imagery is posted there with the appropriate licensing and the ability to download the original high res. So in our other news this week, we want to talk about—well, Artemis 2 is giving us a big picture, but a specialized instrument called ShadowCam hitching a ride on the Korean Danuri orbiter has been peering into the literal darkest corners of the moon. And a new study just published in *Science Advances*—we are revising what we thought we knew about lunar ice. For years we've assumed that the permanently shadowed regions or PSRs at the poles were packed with ice like a cosmic freezer. However, ShadowCam, which is 200 times more sensitive than previous lunar cameras, is showing us that the surface ice is actually much scarcer than predicted. Instead of giant sheets of ice, researchers find small, isolated pockets—some only 20 to 50 meters wide. Dr. Shuai Li from the University of Hawaii describes the moon's water situation like a leaking bucket. Water is arriving by comets and solar wind, but it's also being destroyed or buried by space weathering and meteorite impacts much faster than we realized. So this is a big update for the Artemis 3 landing crews. It means that instead of just landing anywhere in the permanently shadowed regions and digging, we have to be much more precise. We need to target the ancient cold traps, places like the Haworth crater, which have been in the dark for over 3 billion years. If there is a substantial payday for ice for fuel and oxygen, that's where it's going to be hiding. **Jay Shaffer:** Okay, so yeah, that's the perfect bridge. While that ShadowCam is struggling just to find enough light to see into those craters, back on Earth we have the opposite problem. Uh, we're losing the dark. Our dark skies are getting lighter and lighter. And this week marks International Dark Sky Week, and the theme of this year is all about the right to the stars. **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, Jay, if I can interrupt right there. I think that's just an excellent theme. Our Crestone Dark Sky Initiative had a vision statement exercise where we reimagined and recreated our vision and mission statements for our organization, and one of the original proposals was a mention of our birthright for dark skies, and we had some dissent in the group that, you know, well, there is not actually a legal right to darkness and we shouldn't claim that in our vision statement. And my argument was that, you know, none of the rights that we take for granted today were just given to us by benevolent rulers—for every right that we have, we have it because we have asserted it, and we have fought for it. And so, if we're not willing to assert a right to darkness and a right to the night sky, we will never have it. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah. I mentioned to you, you have to fight for your right to party, to quote. And so it's easy to think of light pollution as just a nuisance for astronomers, but it is—it's a profound loss of our heritage. And down here in Taos, we've been, uh, we kind of call it the ancestral night skies in the sense that, you know, the night skies before man impacted them. And the night skies of our ancestors. So when we lose the stars, we lose a part of what it means to be human. And to fight this, Dark Sky International, which was formerly International Dark Sky Association or the IDA, uh, has laid out five principles for responsible outdoor lighting, just to address light pollution, which is one of the only forms of pollution that is easily mitigatable. And so, if you're listening at home, there's 5 things that you can do tonight to cut down on light pollution. Number 1: is the light useful? Every light should have a clear purpose, and if you don't need it, turn it off. Number two: targeted. Direct light only where it's needed. Use shields to keep it from spilling into the sky—so cover the light so that it's not facing upwards—and… or into your neighbor's window, or yard, or whatever. This has been a problem down here is, you know, people will have their big security lights up and it's shining into your neighbor and, you know, me being the neighbor might be wanting to look up at the night sky and having that light pollution is very distracting. And then, uh, number 3 is the light levels, so keep your lights at the lowest level that they need to be. They shouldn't be any brighter than necessary. And number 4 is have the lights controlled. Use timers, motion sensors, or dimmers so the lights are only on or as bright as they need to be when you're actually being used. And then, uh, the fifth and final is a big one: use warm tone bulbs, okay? And so we want to use bulbs with a color temperature of 3000K or lower. That blue rich white light, like daylight, is the most damaging to our circadian rhythms and to the nighttime environment. **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, Jay, it's a simple list, but our challenges are getting bigger, and frankly, moving higher up. Dark Sky International has been incredibly vocal lately about the new threats from above. We've talked about the satellite constellations like Starlink before, including a proposed million satellite constellation. But the concern now extends to the massive ground-based data centers required to run these networks, including the controversial proposed data center project in rural New Mexico known as Project Jupiter. It is a massive multi-billion dollar artificial intelligence data center campus planned for a 1,400 acre site in Santa Teresa in Dona Ana County, near the US-Mexico border. These data centers are often built in remote rural areas—the last few dark havens that we have—and they bring massive light footprints with them. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, Mike. So you are actually—your profession is a network engineer. And so you spend a lot of time in these data centers. Are you seeing some of this? You know, where the data centers are getting larger, being brighter? **Mike Lewinski:** It certainly is an issue, and I can compare and contrast. I run a smaller data center in Louisville, Colorado, which actually, I think, has a pretty good dark sky footprint. We've got the roof covered with solar panels, and we do not have an overly intrusive outdoor lighting. But I've been to much larger data centers, companies like Equinix and Iron Mountain, and I've seen, you know, what their light footprints are, and frankly, they're, you know, order of magnitude or two greater than what ours is. And so yeah, it's a big concern. I will also give a shout out to the *Better Offline* podcast by Ed Zitron, who talks a lot about the economics of these data centers. It is his conviction—and he backs it with some pretty strong evidence—that most of these data centers are never going to be built for economic reasons. The companies that are pledging to build them don't actually have a business model that will support building them, and the money just isn't there to do it. So while there are data centers being built today, a lot of these that are forecast are probably never gonna happen. So even more controversial, you know, is the rise of the orbital advertising and light reflecting technology. There's a company called Reflect Orbital, which is planning to put giant mirrors in space to reflect sunlight down to Earth after dark. Dark Sky International is firmly opposed to this, as I think almost everyone should be. They argue that the night sky is a global commons and not a billboard or an extra sun for hire. And proposing to sell daylight at night is just a fundamental threat to every ecosystem on the planet and all of our nocturnal wildlife. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, exactly. And when we talk about the night sky advertising, I mean, there's companies out there that now they're doing drone swarms—drone swarm billboards in the night skies over cities. And so, you know, that's another, you know, kind of concern is that, you know, where does it end? And so there's actually a massive economic reason to fight for the dark, too. And so down here, a recent piece in the *Taos News* actually highlighted our neck of the woods and noting that Taos in Northern New Mexico and the San Luis Valley are now ranked among the top astrotourism destinations. Go to HomeToGo, which is sort of like VRBO, named Taos, McCall, Idaho, and Moab, Utah—out by where you're going to be at the San Rafael Swell—as the top 3 US astrotourism destinations. And so, people are getting nature-starved, and they're also getting star-starved, and so we… **Mike Lewinski:** Yeah, that's—if I could, Jay, you know, this is a very important point here, and there is a word to describe this: **solastalgia**. This is a portmanteau of the Latin words *solaceum*, meaning solace or comfort, or *solus*, which means desolation, combined with the Greek root *-algia*, meaning pain, suffering, or grief. And the idea of this word, coined in 2003 by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht, was to describe the sense of homesickness that you have when you are still home, but your home is changing in ways that cause distress. And so this was most obviously in reference to global climate change, but I think it also applies equally well to our experience of the dimming night sky. Solastalgia being that experience of stress caused by the loss of the home when you haven't left home. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and uh… we're seeing a huge influx of visitors who are traveling specifically to see places with a dark sky designation, like Crestone and Westcliffe in Colorado, just to see the Milky Way for the first time. And, you know, before I moved to this dark sky location, I was living in Denver, Colorado—the greater Denver area. And if I wanted to photograph the Milky Way, I had to travel, you know, 60, 70, 80 miles out of town just to get out of the light pollution of the Denver metro area enough to see the Milky Way. And now that I can see it every night, you know, I feel, you know, my strongest feeling, a lot like what you were talking about, is that I hope that I never take that for granted, and being able to experience the wonder of the Milky Way. And I hope that we, you know, everybody in this earth can experience that, and that joy. And this just isn't about the science, it's also about tourism dollars. When community protectors like Crestone—it's not just being environmentally conscious, it's creating a destination. Your lodging and restaurants and local galleries are really seeing a real boost from people who want to experience the quiet majesty of the truly dark sky. And I experienced that when I was up there in Crestone for your Dark Sky Festival there, Mike. It was really impressed on how the community was engaged in that. **Mike Lewinski:** That's right, and we are going to host a dark sky event this week in honor of International Dark Sky Week. This coming Friday, April 17th, we are hosting a screening of the film *Defending the Dark*, about a Dark Sky initiative in Maine. That's going to be held at the Baca Grande POA Hall. And I think we're going from 8 to 10 for our event on Friday. We'll put a link in our show notes, and we're going to host a star party immediately following our screening. **Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, and as far as those International Dark Sky Week celebrations and activities go, one of the things that you can do is take the Dark Sky Pledge on the Dark Sky International website. And so, the more people they can get to take that dark sky pledge, that's one of the things that you can do. And you can also look up for events near you on the Dark Sky International website. And so here in Taos, we're also having several lectures this week at UNM Taos and at the Taos Library. And I'm proud to announce that we're having a special astrophotography exhibition featuring seven local photographers, including myself. And I will be premiering my new timelapse film, *Into the Night*. And, uh, we, of course, will include a link to that as well, and that event is going to include a statewide dark skies webinar on Friday at 7 PM, and we're also going to have some booths from our community partners and a raffle for a free telescope. So, if you happen to be doing some ecotourism or astrotourism to Taos, New Mexico, you can come to Bataan Hall on April 17th, 4 to 8:30 PM, or Saturday, April 18th, from 2 to 7 PM. And so, support local artists and help build a community for dark sky initiatives. And um… one more thing I wanted to kind of talk about is that having dark sky lodging. And so I'm a co-host for a glamping operation out here in Tres Piedras, New Mexico. And that glamping operation is totally off-grid, and we have three teepees and a yurt that you can book—and you can look at New Mexico glamping teepees and you can book a teepee out there and we are Dark Sky conforming. And we're actually looking to get from Dark Sky International—they have a new designation for Dark Sky Lodging. And the first place that's been designated as Dark Sky Lodging is the, uh, Grand Canyon North Rim and Grand Canyon Lodge, and so that's another, uh, good destination for you if you're interested in getting out to the night skies. Mike, do you have anything else before we, uh, check out? **Mike Lewinski:** Well, just mentioning that our Baca Grande Property Owners Association has voted to join with the town of Crestone in the dark sky effort, and we approached International Dark Sky about this and were told that we, the POA, could become the first of a new designation for community organizations. So that's really exciting, and I'm happy that our POA is on board. We already had all of the required building code dark sky friendly policies in place. It's really a matter of signaling our commitment to maintaining those and to maintaining the education necessary for new construction. **Jay Shaffer:** Wow, that's… that's great. Yeah, I kind of looked at—I kind of proposed that idea for our HOA when I was the president of the HOA, and they didn't have that designation at that time. So that's something I'm going to definitely pick your brain about. And so… we want to thank everybody for tuning in today. Please be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and go ahead and take the Dark Sky Pledge and let us know what you'd like to hear more about on the podcast. You can check out our websites, Wildernessvagabonds.com and Skylapser.com, and our YouTube channels, Mike Lewinski and also the Skylapser YouTube channel. The intro music is *Fanfare for Space* by Kevin MacLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer, and… wishing you all... **Mike Lewinski:** Mike Lewinski. **Jay Shaffer:** ...clear skies.