**Jay Shaffer** Welcome back to the StarCast for the week of May 17th, 2026. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host from Denver, reporting from Denver, Mike Lewinski. Howdy, Mike. **Mike Lewinski** Hi, Jay. It's great to be here. **Jay Shaffer** How you doing? Good. So, Mike, can you elucidate on what our space weather is looking like over the next couple of days? **Mike Lewinski** Sure thing. Jay, we had a G2 class geomagnetic storm yesterday, and unfortunately, because I have been up here in the big city, I was unable to do any astrophotography this weekend, so I missed capturing it. And I know from experience that it would not have been visible to the naked eye here. But there's a chance that it resurges over the next few days as we continue passing through a stream of solar wind and there's a minor CME that is expected to graze Earth tomorrow, May 18th. So of the six visible sunspots right now, 4436 has been producing M-class flares and is likely to continue sending us solar love. There's a fairly large coronal hole that is continuing to produce a stream of solar wind that we're in now. Officially, we have a 40% chance of M-class flares and a 5% chance of X-class flares over the next two days. And we have a 40% chance of active geomagnetic conditions here at mid-latitudes. 30% chance that we get a minor storm, and just a 10% chance of a severe storm. But if you're up there at high latitudes, there's a 70% chance of severe storms over the next two days. So, Jay, what are we looking at in the night sky this week? **Jay Shaffer** Well, it sounds like 40% chance I should aim my camera north. I've been aiming south and catching the beautiful Milky Way in our clear, dark skies over the last couple of days. And so—and I've got two cameras, so maybe I'll try to set up two cameras to catch both north and south tonight. And so, it's now the day after the new moon, and as seen from the Northern Hemisphere, a razor-thin young moon will appear low in the west after sunset tonight on May 17th. And Blazing Venus will be above the moon, and bright Jupiter will be above Venus. So don't miss these for the next few evenings, because tomorrow night on May 18th, the moon, Luna, will kiss Venus. And then on May 20th, the waxing crescent moon will float close to and flirt with Jupiter, the second brightest planet, and above brilliant Venus, the brightest planet. All three will be easy to spot, even from the city. And as a bonus, Castor and Pollux will be shining nearby, making for an even prettier view. It'll be a beautiful evening scene. So look west shortly after the sun goes down. And by the way, Venus and Jupiter are inching closer and closer each night in the Sky Dome, and their conjunction will fall on June 8th and June 9th, 2026, so that will be a spectacular conjunction. They'll be approximately three moon widths apart, roughly 1.5 degrees or three fingers held at arm length. So, Mike, what's happening in the space news? **Mike Lewinski** Yeah, Jay, just to kick off our news this week, there's a fascinating new study using data from NASA's Black Marble Project that is completely upending how we look at light pollution. For decades, a prevailing assumption among astronomers is that the Earth is just on a steady, gradual march toward getting brighter every single year. But researchers analyzing nearly a decade of satellite data between 2014 and 2022 discovered that there's a much more volatile flickering reality. While global nighttime radiance did surge by 34% overall, that massive increase actually masks a complex regional tug of war between rapid industrial brightening and significant policy driven dimming. The data maps show these stark contrasts are happening right next to each other. In the US, population booms cause the West Coast cities to flare bright gold from space, while major portions of the East Coast actually dimmed thanks to economic restructuring and widespread transition to energy efficient LEDs. Globally, the most dramatic surges in artificial light occurred in China and northern India due to rapid urbanization. On the flip side, nighttime illumination plummeted across Europe, with France dimming by a whopping 33% and the UK by 22%. That's driven by aggressive energy conservation and also the 2022 Regional Energy Crisis. As the authors poetically put it, the overarching signal is unmistakable. The black marble of earth is not merely growing brighter, it is pulsing with intensifying volatility, echoing the amplifying heartbeat of human activity. And before we do dive into our main topic today, we have a bit of bittersweet news for our regular listeners. This episode marks the official season one finale of the DeepSage 9 StarCast. Jay and I are going to take an extended break for the summer to focus on travels, catching up on our workloads and spending some quality time with family. Now, this doesn't mean we are completely disappearing into the dark. If there's a truly massive astronomical event that happens in the next few months, like a spectacular unexpected comet or an intense solar storm, we may just drop a sporadic pop-up episode to break it all down for you. But our regular weekly schedule is going to wrap up the season tackling a question that we get all the time. We're diving deep into the strange, glowing, and often misunderstood world of night sky atmospheric phenomena, trying to answer that ultimate mystery: what exactly are these lights in the night sky? **Jay Shaffer** Exactly. Thanks, Mike. It would be nice to spend some time catching up with some of these other tasks outside of the podcast, especially on Sundays. I see posts like this one I'm about to read all the time, and it's often from casual observers that look up and see something that's unfamiliar to them, and then seek confirmation that they are seeing something extraordinary. So here's a recent Facebook post that I saw in a group that I'm in: "Anyone ever experienced seeing flashes in the sky like subtle but definitely flashes?" And then the replies were from BK, "What colors? I saw something just now. It was just one light. As I drove closer to the Ranchos, and it split like a zygote. I parked at the funeral home and it left." Another response from NM, "It was posted somewhere on Facebook that these lights plus other anomalies have been reported throughout the United States. I was trying to see a timeline or dates, but didn't see one when it was occurring." And in another response from YD, "I have, among the other things, lol, apparently there's been reports all across New Mexico these last couple days. I wasn't out much last night." And then the next one was from, "I've seen green flashing lights in the skies on 2 separate times. Meteors, maybe?" And then finally from JC, "Then swirling lights followed by flashes," with a hum emoji. So, I have responded to this group many times with videos and exclamations about Starlink satellite flares. And from reading the explanation, as sketchy as it was, I would have surmised that these would have been the Starlink flashes or flares that we see along the horizon. And so it seems that every time a newbie sees these flashes, it launches a whole new round of speculation. So, can you do your best to explain some of these night sky phenomena that you and I are seeing in our time lapses and observations? **Mike Lewinski** Yeah, Jay, boy, I first started photographing wide field night sky in 2011. That was about the time that the mirrorless cameras got inexpensive enough that I could afford one, and the technology with digital cameras at that point made it practical. And I had seen some night sky time lapses that just really blew my mind, and so I was very excited to be able to try that out. And I will say that it's one thing to walk outside and spend half an hour looking up and taking a couple photos. It's another thing altogether to set out a camera every night before sunset and let it run to sunrise, and then in my case, usually two cameras. So I'm capturing about 70% of the sky with wide field cameras in time lapse, where they take a 10-second exposure and then immediately take another 10-second exposure; the gap between my exposures is usually less than 1 second. So effectively, I'm capturing almost all of the night sky, probably 70 to 80% of the year, and have been doing so for the better part of the last decade. The first thing that when I first started doing this, it was the satellites, it was airplanes—these were the first things that I started to notice in the sky as objects that were moving, and I started to pay, of course, some attention to: Is this a meteor? Because that's what I was really hoping to capture were some meteors. And so I learned early on how to differentiate, and the primary point is that most meteors are shorter duration than 10 seconds as they're actively entering the atmosphere. Satellites and airplanes, those light trails persist through multiple frames. And it's pretty easy to distinguish in a still frame from a time lapse an airplane from a satellite, because the lights on the airplane wings are typically flashing red and green, and as a consequence, they look like dotted colored trails, whereas the satellites are just reflecting sunlight, and so they are just single points of white lines that then appear from frame to frame with a very tiny break as the camera is resetting between frames. **Jay Shaffer** Yes. And another thing on that is usually aircraft you will be able to track them from horizon to horizon or from a horizon until they go out of your frame, and often I notice with satellite trails is that they appear when they get into the sunlight, and so that may or may not be at the horizon, and it usually is quite a bit above the horizon, and then they tend to appear and disappear. **Mike Lewinski** That's right. And same goes for the International Space Station, which is always kind of an exciting sight. It's one of the brighter objects that is moving across the night sky. Again, it's just reflecting, but because of its size, it's quite bright and it will disappear into a shadow. And so there are sites out there that give times for overpasses, and just based on the amount of time lapse that I make every year, I capture it dozens and dozens and dozens of times. I will also say that airplanes are sometimes doing fairly interesting things. If you happen to be near an airport and you get takeoff and landing, there's often a plane has to take off in one direction, but then it has to do a U-turn and come back the other direction. If there are low level clouds or even sometimes high level clouds, you get airplanes passing through the clouds, and those are some of the most fascinating objects to look at in a time lapse, where you just see this glowing red orb that's shining through the cloud, and I can't often say definitively, "Well, that's an airplane," but I can say from practical experience that that's an airplane. I can't say it definitively, but statistically, that's what it is. **Jay Shaffer** Yeah. Yeah, and then knowing kind of how our aircraft lighting works, and so often I live fairly close to our little airport here, and so they'll actually do their final approach turn and then turn on landing lights. And so then, from whatever your point of view is, that turn and then the turning on the lights can definitely appear as something unusual to a casual viewer. **Mike Lewinski** Right. I've seen that and captured that myself a number of times and sometimes it's very stunning. We also get a couple other kinds of flights that really capture attention. One is search and rescue because I live at the base of a number of 14ers that are particularly hazardous. We seem to lose one or two people a year—and by lose, I mean they fall and die or they become very injured and require dramatic rescue. And often, they've been out there hiking all day and then they don't show up at night, and that's when the search and rescue team goes out. So I get to see helicopters and airplanes that are circling the mountains with spotlights pointed on the mountains. That's always very interesting, especially if it's a prolonged search where they're up there flying for hours and then returning to refuel and then going back up and looking again for somebody who's lost. And then also, when there's a forest fire, I have seen planes that are fighting the fire with water drops, they will be also circling over that site and coming and going repeatedly. So over several hours, it starts to create a very interesting light trail. If I stack my frames together, then I get these circles of light over the glow on the horizon. Those are all the man-made things that we're accustomed to seeing, and the one that I think is most important to talk about next is, yes, the Starlinks, and not just the newly deployed trains of satellites, which really do appear alien when you see this string of lights of a dozen or more objects all traveling in one row across the night sky silently. It just feels eerie. And next to that are the actual launches of the Falcon 9 rockets. Even in Colorado and New Mexico, we can see the plume of the exhaust as those Falcon 9s launch out of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. When I know that there's a launch, sometimes I will go out with my telephoto lens and point it to the west. And then put the live launch stream from YouTube onto my cell phone and listen to the countdown so that I know that it didn't get scrubbed at the last moment, and then I hear that there has been a successful launch. Sometime within the next 10 minutes, if I'm lucky, I see a cloud of white light that is starting to ascend into the night sky. And by that point, the rocket itself is well into orbit, and I'm seeing the trail of exhaust from one of the boosters. And you and I have both captured the so-called SpaceX Aurora, where the rocket is punching a hole in the ionosphere, and exciting the gases, basically creating ionization and releasing red light usually, and it appears as a puff, a ball of glowing red light that persists for a few minutes. **Jay Shaffer** Yeah. And then actually just this last week, while you were up there in Denver, I was lucky to capture a plume from a fuel dump from a Chinese rocket. And so this is the second time I've captured this, and it literally looks like a white ghost going across the sky. And I could see where a casual viewer would be just astounded at seeing that. **Mike Lewinski** Yeah, and most of what we're talking about here outside of the space station and satellites and airplanes—the Starlink trains, the rocket launches, the SpaceX Aurora—these are all relatively new phenomena. I did not see any of these things up until a few years ago. So the sky has been changing, and not just in natural ways, but because of human influence. So I think with that said, there's sort of a set amount of human-caused objects that we can see in the night sky, and then there is a whole other set of natural phenomena that are really why I'm doing this. And there are times when, I'll tell you, the satellites and the airplanes are sort of depressing. There's so much happening there that the view of the night sky as our ancestors knew it doesn't exist any longer, at least not in our part of the world. Maybe if you get toward the poles or some very remote place, you're still going to see the Starlinks because, of course, they are aiming for global coverage, but maybe not a lot of the others. **Jay Shaffer** Yeah. **Mike Lewinski** I should also add that sometimes some of these rocket launches you have a booster that spirals out of control. And I think this is probably the single most dramatic, and I have yet to really capture one of these. But I have seen plenty of very stunning photos of spirals in the night sky where a rocket booster is venting fuel and steam and is spinning, and so that trail of what it is venting is created as a spiral. And surely, if you were looking for evidence of extraterrestrials, that would be the thing that you would fixate on. And I don't know what to tell people who want to believe so badly that they simply can't accept the actual explanation. We know that a rocket was launched. We know that's what the booster did. We know that's how it appears. And someone who doesn't want to accept that is not going to take any argument that I have at face value. So like I say, the natural phenomena are the ones that really excite me and that I am out there for—the auroras, the sprites, the air glow, and gravity waves and comets. These are the things that really excite me. And of course, the meteors, and especially the meteors that leave persistent ion trains. And so as we kind of transition here into talking about those phenomena, I think that meteors with persistent ion trains is the first thing that I really keyed in on in the early to mid-2010s as I ramped up to do nightly time lapses. And it took me a while to work out all of the logistics for powering a camera for 6 to 12 hours, depending on the time of the year, and keeping my lenses relatively frost free in the wintertime, and just the whole process of assembling time lapses. I've gotten better at it over time. And so sometimes a meteor as it enters the Earth's atmosphere creates a trail of ionization, of glowing light where the meteor is, again, stripping electrons off of molecules in the atmosphere and creating ionization. And that is causing the emission of light from those molecules, and it can persist. So you see a meteor streak overhead, typically one to three seconds in duration—a few rare ones last longer than that, but most are, I would say, 95% of all meteors are less than a second or about a second. And yet you see this trail of light that lasts. What my eye sees may last only for another 4 to 5 seconds, but in a case like that, my camera will see that trail persisting for 10 to 20 minutes. And it's not just that there is a straight line of light there in the sky that gradually dims; because those ions are still within the Earth's atmosphere, even at a very high altitude where it's not surface level winds—there's not that much atmosphere up there, but at the very high altitudes, it is distorting and twisting these light trails. Sometimes they twist them into knot shapes, and they bend back on themselves or just distort into different directions. So those are some of the most exciting, dramatic things that I see in a time lapse, pretty much without fail. I'm now seeing hundreds of these. When I get a good one, I gasp aloud. Look at that! I'm very excited to capture a new one, and I don't know that that excitement for me is ever really going to diminish. **Jay Shaffer** Yeah. **Mike Lewinski** Then the air glow and gravity waves are sort of the second most exciting and common phenomena that I see. Any time of the year we can get air glow, which is, again, there's an ionization that's happening, but this is mostly caused by sunlight interacting with the Earth's atmosphere. You have molecules that are losing electrons and becoming ionized, and then emitting that light during the recombination when they gain their electrons back. Often there is a photon that is emitted during that process. And so, AirGlow can take different colors. It can be very often green, but blue and red and purple. I mean, you get some color and some subtle transitions over the night. It's not unusual to start a night out and have kind of a red cast to the sky once it gets completely dark, and then for that to give way to green or vice versa. And sometimes it's just a uniform, nice green glow across the whole sky, and sometimes it is in bands and ripples, and this is where the talk of gravity waves comes in. And so when I first started posting videos with gravity waves, I got some real skeptical, snarky comments from people who thought I was talking about gravitational waves. And these are very different things. With gravitational waves, we're talking about the collision of two black holes somewhere else in the galaxy, where the fabric of space-time is stretching and contracting, and we are measuring that in very sophisticated ways with lasers. It's not a phenomenon that any human is hopefully ever going to see; I think if we get to the point where we're seeing gravitational waves with our eyes, we're in real big trouble. But the gravity waves are a different—different beast altogether. Here we are talking about the Earth's gravity causing a ripple in the ionosphere. And it is most obvious when there is some air glow that can start to create bands of light and dark, and it really does sometimes just look like ripples on a pond. **Jay Shaffer** Yeah, I just was going to say, when I first saw the gravity waves in my time lapses, I thought that it was actually sensor noise on my camera. **Mike Lewinski** Sure. **Jay Shaffer** And actually it was you that kind of let me know exactly what I was seeing there. And then, yeah, and then just real quickly, could you tell our listeners the difference between what SkyGlow and AirGlow is? **Mike Lewinski** Yeah, so with SkyGlow, we really are talking about the reflection of light pollution from Earth that is illuminating the water vapor that may not be otherwise visible. In other words, there's water vapor up there in the sky all the time that is not condensed into clouds, but it is still causing the twinkling of stars. And there's enough water molecules up there in the atmosphere to catch some of the light that humans are emitting, and it just creates this glow that is not caused by ionization. It is not the atmosphere emitting photons due to chemical reactions, but rather just the trapped light that is hitting it from these man-made emissions on the surface, typically. So it's easy to confuse them. Air glow is good. Sky glow is bad. [Mike L.] 10:18:08 Water vapor up there in the sky all the time that is not condensed into clouds, but it is still causing the twinkling of stars. [Mike L.] 10:18:18 And that there's enough water molecules up there in the atmosphere to catch some of the light that humans are emitting, and it just creates this [Mike L.] 10:18:32 glow that is not caused by ionization. It is not the [Mike L.] 10:18:38 atmosphere emitting photons due to chemical reactions, but rather just the trapped light that is hitting it from this man-made [Mike L.] 10:18:51 emissions on the surface, typically. So it's easy to confuse them. Air glow is good. Sky glow is bad. We would like sky glow to go away very much, and we would like [Jay Shaffer] 10:19:02 Except for light pillars, because I love light pillars. [Mike L.] 10:19:04 Yeah, right. [Mike L.] 10:19:06 Yeah [Mike L.] 10:19:07 Same, same. Light pillars are awesome, happen especially in the wintertime when you've got, you know ice crystals and point sources of street lights and other bright lights that are shining up [Mike L.] 10:19:23 And just [Mike L.] 10:19:24 illuminating a pillar. And typically it's not just one. You'll look out and see a dozen or more over a small community. The brightest light sources. Very ethereal, very otherworldly, you know, like the [Mike L.] 10:19:41 Like the spiraling rocket boosters, I put light pillars into that category of you know now I believe in spirits and and aliens because I've seen these things that you know I don't want to accept what they really are, because [Mike L.] 10:19:56 The fantasy of what they could be is so much more exciting. And, you know, I have a little sympathy for people who fall into that belief system, you know, that they're so [Mike L.] 10:20:10 disenchanted with what our society has created and given to them for their meaning, that they… they need to, you know, animate the world and the universe with other other things that are more [Mike L.] 10:20:27 magical, let's say. So, and speaking of magic, I guess we should really move on and talk about the sprites, the elves, the trolls, and the ghosts, because [Mike L.] 10:20:37 Boy, if scientists really wanted to create some conspiracies, they have got a great naming convention going for the transient [Mike L.] 10:20:46 luminous electrical phenomenon, or Tleys transient luminous events that we see associated typically with thunderstorms. [Mike L.] 10:20:59 And I'll start with sprites because this was the first that I managed to capture myself with my camera. I had read just a little bit about sprites. And so when there is a large thunderstorm [Mike L.] 10:21:16 We see bolts of lightning, you know, cloud to cloud and cloud to ground. [Mike L.] 10:21:21 And sometimes above those especially large thunderheads, there are bursts of lightning that are cold, that are going from the top of the cloud up to the very edge of the mesosphere, right up to right up to space, basically [Mike L.] 10:21:40 And what a sprite looks like. They call them red sprites for a reason. They look like giant jellyfish, these big structures with tendrils that are [Mike L.] 10:21:52 hanging out of a big cloud often there's different structures that form and different… they get carrots and [Mike L.] 10:22:02 Jellyfish and some other names that kind of just describe the general shape and structure. But I will say a couple things about the sprites that I think are important to know. First of all [Mike L.] 10:22:14 These are very, very brief events. They're lasting a few thousandths of a second. And they were not known to science until the 90s. Before then, pilots had occasionally reported seeing these things [Mike L.] 10:22:31 And the reports were just too sporadic to take seriously. I could imagine being a atmospheric physicist and saying, well [Mike L.] 10:22:42 That was probably just a reflection off your cockpit of some instrumentation, you know, and flash of red light, yeah, yeah, we don't… we don't have anything on record about that. And [Mike L.] 10:22:54 Eventually, they were captured by film, and it really took the camera technology getting good enough for us to start capturing those. Their best photographed with [Mike L.] 10:23:07 sensor that has the infrared cutoff filter removed, because a lot of that light emission is in the infrared. But they are sometimes visible if you know when and where to look, and you're really, really lucky, you may get to see one. I have not been so lucky, even though I've captured dozens of sprites [Mike L.] 10:23:24 in time lapse. I think I mentioned on a recent podcast that my goal this year is to start tracking some of the storms that are way out there, and by way out there, I mean from Crestone. I'm looking over Raton, New Mexico, or over the Oklahoma Panhandle [Mike L.] 10:23:43 And to do a little bit more visual [Mike L.] 10:23:49 observation, and probably, you know, part of the way I'm going to finally get to see these myself is by setting up a tether to my camera and downloading the photos continuously, and and then reviewing them. And so you know every 10 min [Mike L.] 10:24:08 Looking at the loop time lapse from the last 10 minute cycle to see because once there's a storm that is producing sprites, they tend to persist for a while. And this is what I saw the first time I captured these. I was in Budo, New Mexico [Mike L.] 10:24:26 2013 and [Mike L.] 10:24:31 I had gone out. This was not yet in an era where I had the ability to run my cameras off of a battery bank. The cameras just didn't support an external power supply. So it was necessary for me to change my batteries every couple hours, and I just set a timer [Mike L.] 10:24:48 I would get up and go get the dead batteries, put in fresh batteries, recharge them, and just repeat that cycle throughout the night. And I was looking at my… I have a spectrum modified camera from Spencer's in Utah [Mike L.] 10:25:03 And they had removed the IR cutoff filter on this camera, and I was one of the processes with an E-mount lens is your focus is always reset [Mike L.] 10:25:16 to some indeterminate value whenever you turn it off, just simply turning it off, you've lost focus. And so and all I had were E-mount lenses at the time. I had no manual lenses. And so it was always necessary. If I changed a battery [Mike L.] 10:25:33 I had to reset my focus. And to do that, it's always necessary to use the [Mike L.] 10:25:44 magnification to set it at a one-to-one magnification on the Lcd review, because what may appear to be in focus at an overview of the whole scene turns out to be very, very out of focus once you do a one-to- [Mike L.] 10:25:58 And you see, instead of these pinpoints, you've just got blobs. So I was looking at my focus, making sure that it was reset to the closest pinpoint infinity I could make. And I saw a little smudge of red on the [Mike L.] 10:26:16 horizon. And I just dismissed it. I thought, no, this is [Mike L.] 10:26:22 a reflection of a cart tail light somewhere down there on the highway by the Rio Grande. You know I just it wasn't dramatic enough in that particular viewing for me to think anything of it, and the next morning I got up [Mike L.] 10:26:39 There was persisting for hours these flashes of sprite lightning that were happening over the Oklahoma Panhandle. And I was fortunate enough [Jay Shaffer] 10:26:49 Wow [Mike L.] 10:26:52 to being communication with Thomas Ashcraft, who is a [Mike L.] 10:26:57 Amateur astronomer in Santa Fe who specializes in making very high-speed videos of sprite lightning. He's been interviewed in the New York Times, on the PBS New Mexico show Calores. He's a very interesting person [Mike L.] 10:27:14 And [Mike L.] 10:27:15 We also both captured a meteor that night that was pretty dramatic, and I saw his post about it, or a story about it on SpaceWeather.com, so I reached out to him and said, hey, I caught that meteor also, here's my photo. And by the way [Mike L.] 10:27:30 Did you capture any sprites last night? And he said, oh yes, there was a storm over Oklahoma, and we compared notes and confirmed that we were photographing the same set of sprites. And it was only because he told me that they were over the Oklahoma panhandle that I knew that that's what we were looking at. But these things tend to form over [Mike L.] 10:27:51 the planes, big storms, the, you know, the really mammoth shell [Jay Shaffer] 10:27:56 Supercells. Yep. [Mike L.] 10:27:57 Yeah, yeah, the supercells. And [Mike L.] 10:28:01 You know, we talked a little bit, we mentioned Paul Smith last week, I think on the show is the person who is the most [Mike L.] 10:28:10 dedicated to sprite chasing and running around the planes to find the best storms and doing… I looked at his time lapse or his photo workshops. I mean, they're $3,000 for a week out there with him, which [Mike L.] 10:28:23 I would say was well worth it if I had the spare cash, I would. I would be spending some time this summer out there in Texas and Oklahoma watching for sprites [Mike L.] 10:28:36 So, you know, and the thing about the sprites is they're very brief, but they are also immense. They are, you know, regularly compared to the size of Mount Everest in volume [Mike L.] 10:28:49 So they last for a few thousandth of a second, but they fill an immense amount of the night sky. And to see them, you need to be a few hundred miles away. If you're under the storm producing sprites, you're never going to see it. [Mike L.] 10:29:03 So [Mike L.] 10:29:05 And then there are related phenomenon of the [Mike L.] 10:29:09 the Blue Jets [Mike L.] 10:29:11 And elves and trolls and ghosts, the green ghosts, these are all additional and much rarer [Mike L.] 10:29:21 Electrical phenomenon associated with electrical storms. I'm not going to go into each one of these, honestly. [Jay Shaffer] 10:29:29 -H [Mike L.] 10:29:30 I've only ever captured the sprites. I would love to capture some of these others [Jay Shaffer] 10:29:36 Yeah, and they're more often I've seen more captures of those from the ISS and observers in space or satellites than I have from terrestrial observers. [Mike L.] 10:29:49 That's right. Absolutely. [Mike L.] 10:29:54 And go ahead. [Jay Shaffer] 10:29:54 And so [Jay Shaffer] 10:29:56 No, you go ahead. I was just going to bring up Steve's and the Aurora associated phenomena. [Mike L.] 10:30:03 Yep. [Mike L.] 10:30:10 Right, yeah, no, that was absolutely where I wanted to go next was Aurora, Steve, and Sara. I will say the SAR ARC is probably the [Mike L.] 10:30:22 Newest to me phenomenon associated with geomagnetic storms [Mike L.] 10:30:28 And has been very prominent for the last couple of years that I've been in Crestone during the solar maximum [Mike L.] 10:30:36 At first I thought this must be a Steve and it was after a lot of reading that I realized that, no, Steve has a slightly different set of coloration and [Mike L.] 10:30:50 behavior than the SARC. [Mike L.] 10:30:54 So stable auroral red is the name of the SAR acronym. Stable Auroral red. [Mike L.] 10:31:03 And so we call them SARCs because you get this band of red light that can just hang out in the same place, very stable. The name is, I think, well descriptive of what it is. I mean, it will, over the course of a night, you know, possibly rotate a little bit overhead [Mike L.] 10:31:21 You know, from the horizon just rising higher, but it's at such a slow rate of speed that [Mike L.] 10:31:27 Sometimes you don't even really notice that motion in a time lapse. And as I understand it, you know, the SAR arc is not a direct geomagnetic storm. In other words, it's not the CME [Mike L.] 10:31:44 Itself that is causing that it is rather the heating of the [Mike L.] 10:31:50 Earth's atmosphere by a rural activity that is causing this secondary effect. So yes, there is a Northern Light display happening, and it is a indirect cause of this [Mike L.] 10:32:06 By way of atmospheric heating [Jay Shaffer] 10:32:10 And yeah, I mean, often you can see this at lower latitudes than you can the actual aurora. And sometimes an aurora will cause a SAR that you wouldn't see it through your latitude, but you would see the SAR. [Mike L.] 10:32:25 Yes. [Mike L.] 10:32:26 And Steve is a related kind of thing in that it's a band of light that seems to kind of hang out for a while. [Mike L.] 10:32:37 What we call a backronym now, you know. [Mike L.] 10:32:40 people who were citizen scientists in this project called Aurora Saurus discovered this purplish [Mike L.] 10:32:48 purplish green ribbon of light, and they didn't know what it was called, so they just called it Steve, because, you know, it was funny. And then, as so often happens, we get a name, and we need an explanation for the name, because it's stuck. So Steve is a strong thermal emission velocity enhancement [Mike L.] 10:33:07 They did a good job with the acronym on that. [Jay Shaffer] 10:33:10 You're right [Mike L.] 10:33:14 So it is definitely associated with solar flares and the coronal mass ejection that come with the flares. And that's something, you know, it's maybe worth talking a little bit here about these events. You know, we get [Mike L.] 10:33:29 A solar flare, and when there is a solar flare very often the X rays cause a shortwave radio blackout almost immediately, you know, within 10 minutes that radiation has reached the earth and it is interfering with [Mike L.] 10:33:47 radio radio communications. Now [Mike L.] 10:33:51 Not all solar flares produce coronal mass ejections, and so not all solar flares have the potential to create aurora borealis or aurora Australis. It is only those solar flares that have [Mike L.] 10:34:09 Coronal mass ejection accompanying them. and the coronal mass mass is our key word there. You know the solar flare produces an X-ray that's electromagnetic energy traveling at the speed of light [Mike L.] 10:34:22 The coronal mass ejection is not traveling at the speed of light. And so the CMEs take time to reach Earth, and so if we have a radio blackout from a solar flare, and there is also a CME event [Mike L.] 10:34:37 the solar, the geomagnetic storm is going to come a couple days later, typically it all depends on the speed of that CME, but it's not traveling anywhere near the speed of light. So, you know, talking about 8 min for [Mike L.] 10:34:53 X-ray event to black out radio communications, and you know typically 2 to 3 days for Northern Light displays to show up associated with the same flare. [Mike L.] 10:35:06 And so and there are also these solar proton events, and I am not extremely [Mike L.] 10:35:16 Well versed in all of the solar physics that are accompanying the proton storms. But I do know that there have been some [Mike L.] 10:35:30 Massive events in the past, in particular in the first [Mike L.] 10:35:38 thousand years ad there were a couple events that were recorded around the world and there may have been visible [Mike L.] 10:35:49 phenomena in the sky, even during daylight hours because of these very strong solar proton events and that are definitely recorded both in the written record [Mike L.] 10:36:05 And in the archaeological record in in cave drawings or paintings, and then in in the tree rings in the data that we get from studying fossils and [Mike L.] 10:36:21 So we in modern times have not seen something of that scale. We talk about the Carrington event, and that was the closest we have come. [Mike L.] 10:36:35 You know, to one of those events that leaves its mark in the geologic record or the fossil record, let's say. [Jay Shaffer] 10:36:46 Well, I think we could actually talk all day about this. You know, we haven't even started to talk about like transient phenomena like green flashes and ball lightning and orbs and stuff like that [Jay Shaffer] 10:37:01 But there's a lot of the casual viewer can use tools like we use to actually quantify what they are seeing. And I think that we could [Jay Shaffer] 10:37:14 discuss about some of the tools that we use and some of our observational techniques. And so [Jay Shaffer] 10:37:23 I think the first thing that I would like to talk about is when and where the phenomena was observed. So, you know, for a casual observer is that they'll post something that I just saw a light in the sky that did this and this and this [Jay Shaffer] 10:37:41 But they won't say exactly what time it was and which direction they were looking and how far up they were looking. So if you see something that's unusual, you know, first try to quantify [Jay Shaffer] 10:37:57 The direction that it's in and what its elevation might be and what time that it occurred, and then you can often use tools like [Jay Shaffer] 10:38:11 For example, to determine whether or not it's a satellite, you can use a tool, you can use a website heavens above to determine if it's an aircraft. You can look at several aircraft tracking sites that track the ADS [Jay Shaffer] 10:38:28 be transponders of aircraft [Jay Shaffer] 10:38:32 And for a meteor, you can actually check the American Meteor Society and see if there are other reports of a meteor that you possibly saw. [Jay Shaffer] 10:38:46 Can you expand on this a little bit there, Mike? [Mike L.] 10:38:50 Yeah, I like Stellarium for a lot of my general [Mike L.] 10:38:57 What is that in the sky? Because very often it's, oh, that's serious. I mean, the most common, oh my God, I saw a UFO experience of people that I know and that I have personally had [Mike L.] 10:39:11 It's been serious. It's serious. [Jay Shaffer] 10:39:13 Or our planet, yeah [Mike L.] 10:39:15 Yeah, we're a planet, right? And so this stellarium is an application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as Android and I believe iPhone. I don't have an iPhone to test it, but [Jay Shaffer] 10:39:31 Yes, yes. [Mike L.] 10:39:33 It's very helpful. You can fast forward and reverse. It has a [Mike L.] 10:39:38 Augmented reality view. So you can point your phone's camera up at the sky and have it overlay what you're seeing as far as stars and planets. And so, you know, I think if we want to get serious about identifying things, it helps to [Mike L.] 10:39:56 already have a pretty good sense of [Mike L.] 10:40:00 what's out there all the time, every night, night after night [Mike L.] 10:40:04 You know, and [Mike L.] 10:40:08 I do, because of making ongoing time lapse project, I very closely attune to what phase the moon is in, what planets are up. And I use things like, I should also mention shout out to [Mike L.] 10:40:26 The site transit-finder.com. This is a site that you give at your location, and it will tell you [Mike L.] 10:40:37 When you might see Iss or Tiangong or Hubble pass in front of the moon or the sun. I see I've got a Hubble transit coming up at the end of the month, passing in front of the moon [Mike L.] 10:40:53 So some things are predictable, and certainly those man-made space stations and big telescopes are predictable, and you can check on those. There's a number of other apps out there that will [Jay Shaffer] 10:40:56 -H [Mike L.] 10:41:10 show you every satellite in the sky. And so you can, again, with augmented reality view, point your phone up and have it tell you which number space link satellite that is you're looking at or style satellite you're looking at [Mike L.] 10:41:27 And I also still am on the desktop to sometimes plan my if we've got a full moon rising, I like to get a good fix on where I expect to see that rising on the horizon so that I can attempt to [Mike L.] 10:41:45 film the moonrise coming up over the mountain peaks. It's just always a spectacular view. [Jay Shaffer] 10:41:51 And then another thing is like, and using credible sources is really important. For example, like in the com, you know some of these comments, so when we had the [Jay Shaffer] 10:42:07 The extra solar comet come through. I forget his exact designation, but so there was a lot of hype and misinformation out there about that. But I always say to rely on a good credible source is always NASA. And NASA [Mike L.] 10:42:14 Oh, yeah. [Jay Shaffer] 10:42:27 You know, basically public domain data and information that has been confirmed as being good, solid science. And so if you want to find out about a meteor or a comet or something like that, that's always a great resource to go to rather than [Jay Shaffer] 10:42:48 Some people have been reporting strange things around New Mexico over the last week. [Mike L.] 10:42:53 Yeah. [Mike L.] 10:42:54 Right. And that was a comment 3i Atlas was our most recent one atlas being, I think, the the program that discovered it, 3i being the designation, but it was only our 3rd interstellar comet [Jay Shaffer] 10:42:59 Right right [Jay Shaffer] 10:43:06 Right. [Jay Shaffer] 10:43:07 And so, okay, so we're gonna, I think we can wrap this up a little bit here and then when we're talking about wrapping up, as we wrap up this first season, it's kind of wild to realize that we've [Jay Shaffer] 10:43:22 49 episodes out there into the ether and I say ether almost literally. And we have covered an incredible amount of cosmic territory since we started [Mike L.] 10:43:30 Yeah. [Jay Shaffer] 10:43:39 We've tackled some of the massive heavy hitting science topics. Mike in particular with cosmological things and everything from analyzing [Jay Shaffer] 10:43:50 Conflicting studies on whether supermassive black hole or dark matter sits at the center of our galaxy to track in the history of asteroid detection with the B12 Foundation [Jay Shaffer] 10:44:02 We've looked at the history of ET and the presidents and tracked the modern historic Artemis II lunar mission milestones [Jay Shaffer] 10:44:11 And even looked into the logistics of putting nukes in space to power the future of space exploration. [Jay Shaffer] 10:44:24 But my favorite moments have always been when we brought it back down to Earth to talk about how we as backyard astronomers actually interface with the night sky. And we've shared our personal technical battles and triumphs like transitioning our systems to indie all sky platform, which I kind of struggled with and [Jay Shaffer] 10:44:45 And you're setting up your Zwi all sky camera and me building out my Northeast southwest array here at DeepStage night [Jay Shaffer] 10:44:56 And we've talked about last week, we talked about the golden age of distributed astronomy, celebrating the community power of projects like Ultra Stacking [Jay Shaffer] 10:45:06 With fellow Seastar owners, and sharing our passion to defending our ancestral night skies from light pollution. [Jay Shaffer] 10:45:13 So it's been an amazing ride, Mike, and looking both at the cutting edge of science and the practical joy of backyard [Jay Shaffer] 10:45:21 Stargazing and these 49 episodes have really captured it all [Mike L.] 10:45:26 Yeah, it has been an amazing ride, Jay, and I really appreciate you kicking this off and inviting me to join you. [Jay Shaffer] 10:45:34 Okay, so we want to also thank all of our listeners for tuning into this podcast and ongoing, you can check out our websites, which we will be maintaining. Mike's will be at Wildernessvagabonds.com [Jay Shaffer] 10:45:51 And mine is at skylapser.com, and in addition to the archive of our podcasts that are housed there, I also do blog posts and video and nightly time-lapse displays [Jay Shaffer] 10:46:06 Then you can actually look at real time observing on skylapser.com from the observatory. And you can also check out Mike's time lapses on his YouTube channel. I'm a religious subscriber [Jay Shaffer] 10:46:22 And you should be too. And you can check out my videos on the Skylapser YouTube channel. And I'm not nearly as diligent as Mike, but I am going to be now, I promise [Mike L.] 10:46:38 All righty [Jay Shaffer] 10:46:40 And so our intro music was a great find and it is fanfare for Space by Kevin McCloud from the YouTube Audio Library. [Jay Shaffer] 10:46:53 From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer and [Mike L.] 10:46:58 Mike Lewinski. [Jay Shaffer] 10:47:00 Wishing you all farewell and clear skies.