## Transcript: Deep Sage Nine StarCast (May 3, 2026)


**Jay Shaffer**
 Welcome back to the StarCast for the week of May 3rd, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my intrepid co-host, Mike Lewinski. Howdy, Mike!

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

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, so we took a 2-week hiatus there. And kind of the reasons for that is that you were traveling, and I was participating in our International Dark Sky Week exhibition here in Taos, and so… and that really went well over that that weekend at a photography exhibition, and I premiered my new time-lapse film called *Into the Night*, and we had about, uh, probably 160 people over two days, uh, visit the exhibition and, you know, chatted with a lot of people about dark skies. And so that was really great. And then, uh… The Astronomy club here, the El Valle Astronomers, in conjunction with the BLM, had a star party up at the Wild Rivers Recreation Area north of Taos. And that party, they had about, they said 60 people, visitors visit the Star Party, and it got some good press in the Taos News. And then also that was followed up by last week's Lyrid meteor shower, or Lyrid, or however you would prefer to pronounce it. And we had pretty much cloudy skies, but I did get one good fireball right on the edge of a cloud, and it kind of lit up the whole sky. And I thought that was a pretty cool image on my time lapse. And so, Mike, you were out in Utah, so, uh, tell us a little bit about your trip.

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah, Jay, right before leaving town. We did host with the Crestone Dark Sky Group, a showing of the film *Defending the Dark* at the Poa Hall, and that we had a nice turnout for that. It was a good evening. We did a star party right afterwards. You know, a little bit smaller than your event down there, but we're just a smaller community. So I was happy. We, you know, had when we planned our events at the beginning of the year, we didn't didn't plan something for Dark Sky Week. And then, as it started approaching, we realized we really needed to. And so I I do recommend *Defending the Dark* if you can catch that on PBS. It's a documentary about the Dark Sky Movement up in Maine. So I hung out long enough to go to that event, and then I spent my Saturday packing up, and Sunday morning we left for… The deserts of Utah, and this time of year, the canyonlands arches areas are really mobbed. You know, this is ideal weather. If you can avoid the wind and spring storms, you've got really nice daytimes with not too cold nights. Another month from now, it's going to be just unbearably hot out there. So I've learned, avoid arches, avoid canyon lands, avoid Moab at all costs. Beautiful place, but this time of year it's just going to be really packed. So we went out to the San Rafael swell, which is, uh out there west of Green River. And it's just the same beautiful environment of arches and slack canyons and fins and spires and hoodoos at Goblin Valley. We spent a couple nights camped at the trailhead of Chute Canyon. Which is pretty deep into the swell there. And because of that location, and it was... You know, I was hoping to find something with a wider vistas, but we had. We had problems with the train blocking our path to the usual campsite over at Colonnade Arch. So at Chute Canyon, I had a giant cliff to the east of me. I did not get a chance to see Comet Panstars while I was out there. Really, I was surrounded by cliffs in this canyon. I did make some time lapses. They were beautiful. I didn't catch any notable lyrid meteors, but... You know, there's always next year, right? And it was it was clear skies, beautiful viewing, really just spectacular conditions. Had a great hike, lots of wildflowers, highly recommend the area in general. So that's that's my trip report, Jay.

**Jay Shaffer**
Okay. So yeah, we've been a little bit cloudy out here, but what's our space weather been looking like? What do we got coming up from the sun?

**Mike Lewinski**
Well, Jay, there are 8 sunspots facing the earth right now, but they all have relatively stable magnetic fields. NOAA gives us a 45% chance of M class flares and just a 5% chance of X class flares. The largest corona hole facing the earth is so far north on the sun that the solar wind is probably going to go right over us, and we're gonna miss us. But here at the mid-latitudes, we do have a 30% chance of active geomagnetic conditions today. That drops to 15% tomorrow. If you're far enough north, you've got a 40% chance of severe storms today. And that drops to 20% tomorrow. So, Jay, what are we looking at in the night sky this week?

**Jay Shaffer**
Thanks, Mike. We've got a busy week overhead. The moon is going to be a bit of a spotlight hog, though. We are just currently past the full moon, which was on Friday, and waning toward the third quarter moon, which hits officially on May 9th at 2110 UTC, and that's about 3:10 PM right here in Mountain Daylight Time. And then on the planetary front, most of our neighbors are currently hiding in the sun's glare, but Venus and Jupiter are putting on a fantastic pre-show in the West just after dusk. The two brightest planets in our sky, and they are currently engaged in a slow-motion dance leading up to a spectacular conjunction on June 8th and 9th. At their closest, they'll be only separated by about the width of your pinky finger at arm's length. So if you start watching now, you'll see Venus, uh, which is further west, climbing higher each evening, and while Jupiter, which is further east, is now going, uh, sinking slower, slowly toward the horizon. And so, uh, soon they will meet. Uh, we also have the Eta Aquariid meteor shower peaking in the early morning hours of May 5th, so that's, uh, that's Tuesday. And the radiant rises after midnight in the constellation Aquarius to the south, and climbs until dawn and now while the Southern Hemisphere gets a better show because the radiance sits higher for them, it's worth a look for us too and you know and the Eta Aquariids are the actual remnants of the Halley's comet. And so just keep in mind that we'll be competing with the bright waning gibbous moon that might just wash out some of the fainter streaks. It's almost like the moon in Aquarius are together on that night. So it's going to be kind of a washout. Um, and if you're in the southern hemisphere, and we can't… we're kind of getting robbed here in the Northern Hemisphere, uh, if you're in the southern hemisphere and you've got a pair of binoculars handy, point them toward comet C/2025 R3 PanSTARRS, and it's kind of the star of comets, this, uh, uh, over this couple months here. It's currently sitting at a magnitude 8.37, which makes it relatively easy catch for small optics under dark skies. So here at the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, it's been a bit of a battle with the clouds lately, but that said, I've got my new all sky camera up and running, and I have what I call my NEWS array, which stands for North, East, West, and South, is fully operational, where I've got 4 color night security cameras. These are actually, uh… A model called TAPO C325WS, and they're very sensitive security cameras, and I've got them aimed in the 4 directions of the sky. And so I can actually capture real time meteors or fireballs, should they appear? Currently, I'm flying a bit blind on the meteor front, though. I have a dedicated meteor camera, and that camera feeds the New Mexico Meteor array and the Global Meteor Network, and that camera is down, non-functional. I think it, uh, died due to moisture intrusion. And so I'm waiting for a replacement from AliExpress to arrive here in a couple weeks and get that stream back up online. And so we'll actually be diving deeper into how camera rays work in our main topic later in the show. But for now, Mike, what's the latest in space news?

**Mike Lewinski**
Jay, to kick off our news stories this week, it looks like the moon is about to have a very literal encounter with a piece of SpaceX history. Back on January 15th, 2025, a Falcon 9 launched two separate lunar missions, Blue Ghost and Hakuto-R. Once the upper stage finished its job, it became just another piece of space junk drifting through the void. But according to Bill Gray, who is a prolific tracker of near-Earth objects, that rocket stage is now on a definitive collision course. Gray estimates that the impact will happen at 1:44 AM Central Time on August 5th, 2026. It's a striking reminder of the literal footprint we're leaving in the lunar neighborhood. And the reports I'm seeing say that we may not be able to actually see that from Earth. But I'm going to point my telescope at it anyway. Moving from the moon to Mars, the Curiosity rover has just sent back some compelling evidence that Gale Crater was once a much wetter place than it is today. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory announced on April 21st that Curiosity discovered the highest concentrations of iron, manganese and zinc ever found together on the Red Planet. This specific cocktail of metals is very similar to what we see in lakebed deposits here on Earth. What's even more interesting is that these minerals were found tucked inside ripples in the rock, textures likely created by a shallow ancient lake. Now, while this isn't proof of life, it is a massive clue. On Earth, these kinds of mineral deposits are almost always home to microbial life. These findings were published in the *Journal of Geophysical Research, Planets Edition* a few weeks ago. And Gale Crater keeps getting weirder. Curiosity recently stumbled upon a field of what scientists are calling dragon scales. These are honeycomb-shaped polygons that crisscross the rock surfaces near Antofagasta, a relatively young impact crater on the slopes of Mount Sharp. Abigail Freeman from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory noted that while they've seen these patterns before, they've never seen them in this kind of abundance. The leading theory is that the fossilized remnants are from drying mud in a wet-dry cycle billions of years ago. It seems that the more we look, the more Mars reveals its watery past. And I want to just toss in two quick comments about this story, Jay. While I was out there in the Utah desert, I made a point of seeking out Ripple Rock. And it's an environment that feels very much like Mars. You know, they do some of the training for Mars habitations out there in that environment. You've got Red Rock. And in places, yes, I could see the ancient ripples of a now disappeared ocean. And I was hiking down one wash on our first morning out there and came to a point where there were some very beautiful ripples in the mud from a recent flow, and just downstream from that was, you know, fossilized ripples. And, you know, it was hard not to see the process, you know, active, that here's the… here's the mud with the ripples in it, and here's the fossilized ripples downstream. The second thing that, you know, this story brings to mind is the Earth's history of natural nuclear reactors. Some millions of years ago in what is now Gabon, Africa. In the area of Oklo, there were natural nuclear reactors that formed in an area that was periodically inundated with water. And water, as you know, is a good reflector for neutrons and allows criticality to occur. And so, the reactors would get started and boil off the water. And once the water was boiled off, they would go subcritical until the next flood. And there's a couple theories about how this concentration of uranium came to be when it was discovered, there were people who were a little alarmed in the security, um… apparatus, who, you know, believed that this was evidence that somebody in Africa was refining uranium, because they were mining this very refined uranium that you don't normally find in nature. And it took some investigation to turn up the likely culprit being bacteria that had concentrated uranium to such a degree that they… it caused criticality. And that's mentioned in James Lovelock's book, *Ages of Gaia*, by the way. Yeah, natural nuclear reactors burned on the surface of the earth for millions of years. Any rate, that was just my, you know, speculation. Could there have been reactors on Mars? Well, if there was enough water, and there was enough uranium for our hypothetical bacteria to concentrate, then yes. So back to you, Jay.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, and, you know, it's… it just points to the, you know, when we look at the diversity of life on Earth, and, you know, especially from the microbial level, is it can certainly thrive in very, very harsh environments. That is definitely heartening toward the, you know, hope that we can find extraterrestrial life in the solar system, if not the galaxy or the universe. And so, I was actually spending some time on Bill Gray's website. He's the astronomer who's been tracking that Falcon 9 stage heading for the moon. And he, uh, mentioned how much he relies on a global network of independent observers to feed him data for those orbital calculations. He characterizes himself as a mathematical astronomer, not an observing astronomer. And that got to me thinking about distributed astronomy and the power of arrays. And in its simplest form, a distributed astronomy is just a crowdsourced way of looking at a specific target, where many observers contribute data to a single investigation. But when we talk about arrays, we're looking at interconnected systems designed to act as kind of like one giant eye on the sky. And so, Mike, you were looking at a piece in *Sky & Telescope* about something called a distributed aperture telescope. You want to kick things off here?

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah, Jay, there's a fascinating article out this month about how we're moving away from just building a single massive expensive mirror. This new revolution combines multiple smaller telescopes into a single system. A great example is the Condor Array Telescope over at the Dark Sky New Mexico Observatory. They're using a bunch of 18 centimeter refractors equipped with CMOS cameras by stacking those exposures, they can see ultra faint structures or track rapid changes in stars that a single big telescope might miss. Then you have projects like Mothra at the El Sauce Observatory, which uses over 1,100 telephoto lenses. These systems are cost-effective, scalable, and they're already discovering exoplanets and supernova.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, yeah, I love that. And so, yeah, this is kind of a interesting, because, you know, traditionally we talked about big mirrors, you know, they liked big mirrors and they could not lie. So, you know, a traditional telescope would be, you know, where it would have a very large mirror, and of course that was expensive to create and fraught with all kinds of possible anomalies where the mirror wouldn't be perfect, as in the case of like the Hubble Space Telescope. And so kind of the difference going toward these matrix and array philosophy is using smaller mirrors that can be created more precisely and cheaper as opposed to a single large mirror. And, uh, you can basically compare the Hubble Space Telescope with the James Webb telescope, whereas the James Webb telescope uses an array of mirrors to go to a sensor. And then also we're talking about using multiple sensors instead of just one sensor. So in the traditional telescope you had a single sensor that was gathering the data from that mirror and the single telescope. And so uh, you were, uh, relying on the limitations of that particular sensor. And so, in the case of these, um array systems, you have multiple sensors, and so they're each gathering their data. And so, uh… Any of the shortcomings of a particular sensor might be rounded out or smoothed or data smoothed by all these other sensors. And so… and this actually reminds me of a project that we've touched on before, and you and I and a couple of friends participated in, and this was started by a guy named Kai Young over at the Smart Telescope Underground. And he had a Discord channel, and a project that they called Ultrastacking. And this was the ultimate distributed project. So this was when they were just the Seestar S50 telescopes, small smart telescopes were coming out. And so we basically had hundreds of Seestar owners contribute their data and observations of a particular target. So they would all photograph the same target over a period of a month, and then they would combine those hundreds and or if not thousands of images into hundreds of hours of data into one insane image that they called the Ultrastack. And so they've actually kind of dialed that back recently, because now there's some other telescopes that are smart telescopes that are out there, and then they kind of move that project off to, you know, off of that Discord channel. But… but yeah, that… Yeah.

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah, I remember that. It's the same logic as the Very Large Array right here in New Mexico, just on a different scale and wavelength. The VLA is probably the most famous example of an array. 27 massive radio antennas spread out across the Plains of San Agustin. By moving those antennas around, they can mimic the resolution of a telescope that's miles wide, and they're not standing still on this project. They just had an open house last month talking about the next-generation VLA. They're planning to expand to 263 dishes across North America. That's going to be a massive leap in how we see the radio universe using AI to help crunch all that data.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, and uh… have you been down to the VLA?

**Mike Lewinski**
Not, uh, not as a destination. I've driven by and seen it from the distance.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah. Yeah, that's… it's pretty spectacular, and everybody's probably familiar with that from, uh, you know, the different movies that have shown it. What's the one with Jodie Foster about the...

**Mike Lewinski**
*Contact*.

**Jay Shaffer**
*Contact*, that's right. And then, uh, okay. And so, this is all about collaboration. And so this is, I think, grown hugely. I think now this is a kind of a golden age for amateur astronomy in that we can all crowdsource and be a part of, uh, kind of some of these, uh, uh, these, uh these, uh missions, whether it's a multi-million dollar dishes or backyard cameras, this is kind of the way we're observing the universe now. And as I mentioned earlier, my meteor camera is currently down, but which is a bummer because it feeds the New Mexico Meteor Array and the Global Meteor Network. And so the goal of these two networks is that we basically have all these match cameras that are the same cameras and lenses. And they're looking at different directions. And so from different locations all over New Mexico, and also all over the United States and Europe as well. But we have a particular array here down in New Mexico. And then, uh, since we… whenever a fireball streaks across the atmosphere, then we have probably… it gets captured by, uh, you know, two or three or more cameras, and so we have multiple angles on it. And they can actually get a very accurate resolution as to the path of that meteor to whether what its source is and also if it becomes a meteorite, what its actual destination might be. So that that software calculates the meteor's trajectory, speed, and where the meteor might a meteorite might have landed. It's a perfect example of distributed astronomy. And my one little camera in Tres Piedras is just a single pixel in the much larger global picture, although I keep getting nasty emails as why is my data so bad right now? So I'll be glad to get that new camera and get back to contributing to the grid. And so you've got a… you're about to put up an all-sky camera, is that right, Mike?

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah, it's sitting here on my desk, I need to do some drilling and fit some, you know, seals into this box. I was reluctant to put it out before I left for my travels, because I didn't… I wasn't sure I could weatherproof it adequately. So I need to get back to this. Hopefully today. I'm going to spend some time with the drill getting it mounted all together and ready to stick out on my roof.

**Jay Shaffer**
Yeah, and we kind of almost form our own little array. Often nights, you know, we'll talk and say, I'm pointing north, are you pointing south so that you can catch anything that's in between us?

**Mike Lewinski**
Yeah. Yeah.

**Jay Shaffer**
And so… so, you know, that basically says, hooray for arrays!

**Mike Lewinski**
Sounds like the title of this episode.

**Jay Shaffer**
Could be! Uh, we want to thank all of our listeners for tuning in to this podcast. Be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and let us know what you'd like to hear more about. And you can also check out our websites and our YouTube channels. Mike's website is wildernessvagabonds.com, and uh, mine… and the Deep Sage 9 Observatory is at, uh, skylapser.com, and you can check out the live cameras there, or you can go to our YouTube channels and look at our time lapses. Um, 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…  Mike Lewinski wishing you all clear skies.


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