Welcome to the StarCast for the week of September 21st, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. Good morning, Mike, how are you?

I'm doing well. How are you today, Jay?

Doing great. Another beautiful day, just pre-equinox here. Let's take a look at space weather from SpaceWeather.com. Mike, what's up with the sun over the next couple days?

Well, Jay, there is a stream of solar wind that is expected to graze the Earth's magnetic field tomorrow, September 22nd. This would not usually trigger a geomagnetic storm by itself, but during equinoxes, the Russell McFerrin effect does amplify small disturbances in the solar wind. So, there is a chance that we are going to see a G1 class solar storm. The current forecast for us here at mid-latitudes is about a 30% chance of active conditions in the next 24 hours, bumping up to 40% over the next 24 to 48 hours, and then diminishing possibility of a greater storm than that. Now, at higher latitudes, there's a 40% chance of a severe geomagnetic storm, and the next day, and a 60% chance in the 24 to 48 hour windows. So, I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on the northern skies tonight and hoping that we get lucky. So, what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay?

Well, I did finally get lucky on last Sunday night, and we had some clear, dark skies, and I caught that geomagnetic storm from last Sunday, and caught some aurora early in the evening. So I was able to image that, and that was the first time in a while that I've been able to capture that, and so that was really nice. And then Wednesday and Thursday, I observed and imaged Saturn, the comet, we're chose, as well as the Andromeda Galaxy, Pac-Man Nebula, and M17, or the Swan Nebula. So, I got in a little bit of observation this last week. And in this coming week, this morning, Saturn reached opposition at 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And now it's now visible all night, and offering pretty stunning views of its rings and moons, if you have a telescope. It rises now around sunset and it's highest around local midnight, and it's where it stands about 45 degrees high in the south. And so it's a really nice target, and so you can easily observe it about an hour or two after sunset, and until an hour or two before sunrise. So, if you've got a fairly big telescope, this is a good time to observe Saturn and its moons. And of course, early Monday is the autumnal equinox, and that will occur at about 219 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And in this state, the sun appears directly above the equator in the northern and southern hemispheres receive the same amount of sunlight. The autumnal equinox also officially brings the northern hemisphere summer to an end, and brings on astronomical autumn, while bringing the end to winter in the southern hemisphere and the beginning of astronomical spring. This week is also good to catch the newly discovered comet now called Swan to be. Look west with binoculars or with a camera. Just above Mars, just after sunset. Last night, it was still below the horizon in the northern hemisphere at sunset, so it's still a southern hemisphere object for the time being. I'm hoping that this week that with Mars setting a little bit later, and Spica setting a little bit later, is that we'll get some good imagery of that comet, SWAN-2B. Now, let's go ahead and take a look at some space news. Mike, what do you got?

Yeah, Jay, speaking of comets, there is a team of researchers led by University of California Santa Barbara Professor Michael Bakuch, who have found new evidence supporting a theory that a fragmented comet exploded over Earth about 13,000 years ago, and that contributed to the extinction of megafauna and the disappearance of the ancient Clovis culture in North America. The team discovered shocked quartz, which are grains of sand that are deformed by extreme pressures and temperatures, at 3 Clovis archaeological sites in the United States. One of those was in California, one was in Arizona, and one was in New Mexico. And this is considered kind of one of the gold standards for an impact. There's a lot of controversy about this theory that there's no impact crater, and so here, this is a fragmented comet basically air bursting, and not impacting the surface of the Earth. And some of what they find in these shocked quartz is consistent with that, where what you have is a grain of sand that has some actual breaks, or fractures, and those fractures are filled with melted silica. And in an impact crater, you would find these, and they would be pretty consistent in terms of how much shocking had happened, how much melting had happened. But with an airburst, you expect that you're going to find variations of more and less shock, and that's what they're finding here. So there is additional evidence. This discovery was published in the journal PLOS one. And the additional evidence that has been compiled in the past include a black mat, a layer that indicates there was widespread burning. And also high concentrations of rare minerals, like platinum and iridium, that are found in comets, which help support cosmic airburst as a major factor for the younger, dry us, cool episode, a period of abrupt near-ice age conditions. The Earth was exiting the previous ice age and starting to warm up, and then suddenly, for a thousand plus years, there was a markedly cool episode over most of the Earth. And I did get curious about the name Younger Dryas, and did a little bit of reading this morning. The Dryas is a reference to an alpine tundra wildflower, the Dryas octopedala, which I think means 8 petals. And those fossils are abundant, particularly in Scandinavia sediments during this cool period. There's also a period known as the Alder Dryas, which is about 18,000 to 14,000 years before present, with an interstitial warming period. So during those interstitials, you get forests in these areas, and the dryest wildflower disappears from the tundra. So that's why we call it the Younger Dryas, is that the alpine tundra wildflowers had reappeared. So, that I'd like to turn now to our topic today, which is balloons, and specifically astronomical balloons. So, Jay, I've talked to you a little bit about some of my experiences. The first time I had the opportunity to see a high-altitude balloon was back in 2012. I was living in Budo, New Mexico, and sitting out on our patio one night, having dinner at about 5 o'clock, and in August afternoon, and I suddenly noticed in the sky above me a very, very bright point of light that was not visibly moving. And I became very excited, and I ran into the house and grabbed my camera and my best telephono lens that I had available to start imaging this. I was excited because I knew it was too early and too high to possibly be Venus. And because it wasn't moving, I thought perhaps I was witnessing a new supernova. But I wanted to take some photos and see if I could see any more detail. And indeed, I did see more detail, and I knew almost immediately that I was looking at a balloon. With a little bit of research, I learned that this was a balloon that was launched from Fort Sumner in New Mexico. Part of the Columbus Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, which is a NASA operated high-altitude astronomical Balloon Program. So, and this is only the first of several high-altitude balloons that I've witnessed over the years. A few years later, living in, near you in Trace Piedras, I was out one night, and noticed another similar bright point of light around sunset. It was just too high to be Venus, and so I, again, trained my best telephoto lens. Confirmed that it was a balloon. And then ran back inside to see if I could determine what flight it was. If you go to the webpage, and we'll include that in our links, for the CSBF or Fort Sumner, they provide live, real-time tracking, and for this balloon, there was not only GPS coordinates, but a camera that was on the balloon pointed back at Earth. So while I was out recording and making video with my best telephoto lens of the balloon passing over, I was also watching on my cell phone footage from the balloon looking down at me, and that was kind of neat. I tracked that balloon for the next day until it landed, and they left that camera turned on, and in fact, I could watch it as it was parked in the hangar where it lives. The camera's still transmitting to the internet. So, in recent years, last year, and then again this year, we've had a couple balloons floating over the San Luis Valley.

Douglas Glidden.

One of them about a month ago caught my eye, and I just put up an ADS-B antenna and receiver, so I was tracking aircraft signals. And in this case, the balloons are also transmitting ADS-B signals. And so I had seen it on my flight radar map and knew that it was passing back and forth over the Sangre de Cristo Range for about a week, and then saw that it was coming right over me, so I went out and snapped a couple photos of it. And kept watching, and over the subsequent week, we had really kind of interesting occurrence, where and these balloons are all kind of medium altitude for as far as high-altitude balloons go, between 50 and 60,000 feet. And there were there was a second balloon that appeared the next day over the sand dunes. First balloon is still over the valley. And then a third balloon traveled, and these are remotely controlled. Third balloon rendezvoused with the first two near Walsenburg, and then and there was a launch. There was a launch south of Lamar, Colorado, of 3 more balloons. And so there was a period of time where there were 5 high-altitude balloons in a 100-square-mile radius around Walsenburg, and those were all of the high-altitude balloons that were recorded anywhere in the world for that particular period of time. I've been watching today just to point out that there are three current high-altitude balloons that are around Albuquerque right now, all in the 65,000 feet, 64,000 feet and 60,000 feet. And the one at 60,000 feet is looks like it may be headed towards Santa Fe. And that was launched in the last 12 hours from a little east of Albuquerque, north of Moriarty. So I'm just fascinated. I get up every morning, and I look to see where these persistent high-altitude balloons are. Two of the companies that are doing these most frequently that are not government are Aerostar and Worldview. And Aerostar recently announced that one of their high-altitude balloons had broken a world record at 336 days continuously aloft. Two of these balloons that I've been tracking have been aloft for months. And NASA recently broke a record of high-altitude balloon, the Gusto launch, which we'll talk about here in a minute, that spent more than 57 days aloft last February. So, a year ago in February, I should say. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to you to talk a little bit more about why we use balloons for doing astronomy.

Yeah, I was just going to mention that not all high-altitude balloons are astronomy balloons, and not all high-altitude balloons are weather balloons. When we talk or not all weather balloons are high-altitude balloons either. As most people speak about these high-altitude balloons, they automatically say weather balloon. And weather balloons can be actually fairly small in lower-altitude balloons in at various weather stations around the U.S. In almost every county, a lot of the weather stations will release a small balloon. When I say small balloon, I mean something that's between 1 and 2 meters in diameter to basically get the daily weather. And so these are different from the high-altitude balloons that we're using for astronomy research, and also for atmospheric research. And so some of the advantages of these balloons, or they're a lot cheaper than rockets, for example. And they can they can They provide a cost-effective and efficient way to conduct astronomy above most of the Earth's atmosphere. By listing telescopes and scientific instruments to the stratosphere, typically between 18 and 37 kilometers, or 11 and 23 miles above sea level. These balloons overcome several major limitations of ground-based operations. And we just basically call this Near Space. And so when you get up to these altitudes, there's drastically reduced atmospheric distortion. The dense lower layers of our atmosphere scatter and absorb light, particularly in the infrared, microwave, X-ray, and gamma-ray bands. Our atmosphere blocks a lot of this radiation that we want to take a look at from space, and there's actually just kind of these small windows of frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum that get through our atmosphere and to the surface of the Earth, and we call these the windows. And so there's a radio frequency window, and there's also a visible light window, where we get more radiation that gets to the surface of the Earth. But in these other bands, they are blocked by the atmosphere, so by getting up above most of the atmosphere, they the balloons offer a clearer view of the cosmos and allow for observation of wavelengths that would otherwise be blocked.

Yeah, and Chair, if I could just interject there, real quick. I, when I first heard about telescopes on balloons, I thought, well, how do they keep those things stabilized? There must be a tremendous amount of movement, and you've got to have gyroscopes, and fancy electronics to do that, but of course at the altitudes they're flying, there's probably almost no wind whatsoever, because there's almost no atmosphere.

Yeah, that's true, and yeah, and and the gravity is actually less, too, so there's a little bit less gravity. The main thing is that compared to launching a space-based base telescope with a rocket, balloon missions are significantly cheaper, and they actually have a you know, if you have an experiment and a grant and a sponsor or something like that, they actually have space on these balloons for when they're launching them, that you can put an experiment on. And this is significantly cheaper than getting space on a rocket, for example, for a satellite launch. And so, it's also an excellent platform for testing new instruments and technologies before committing them to a more expensive and complex space mission. Just test a piece of electronics or equipment that you're planning to launch onto space. It's a good idea, maybe, to take it to near space and see if there's going to be any kind of engineering failures that that might come to bite you. And so, this allows and they also allow for faster turnaround times between missions, whereas the balloons launch fairly regularly, and they're not in this kind of long ramp up in the schedule, like a rocket would be. And so that would be that's also an available there's a lot more availability on these balloon missions. And another big advantage to these balloons is that they have a large payload capacity. Compared to a rockets, where you're paying tens of thousands of dollars, or thousands of dollars per gram of material that you're sending to space, balloons can carry very heavy payloads, sometimes weighing thousands of pounds, and this larger allows for larger telescopes and more sophisticated instrumentation than would be feasible for many small satellite missions.

Yeah, Jay, if I can, one of the missions that we've looked at is the Astros, A-S-T-H-R-O-S, which is the Astrophysics Stratospheric Telescope. For high spectral resolution observations at submillimeter wavelengths, a very mouthful. This is going to be launched out of McMurdo Station in Antarctica. And they have a 400-foot diameter balloon. This is about the size of a football stadium, and the telescope itself is about 5,500 pounds. It's an 8.5 foot antenna, collecting far-infrared light, so it is not small, and it is not light. And I did just look up, the cheapest you can launch to space right now is on the Falcon Heavy, which is around $1,500 per kilogram. So, the costs are coming down, but the launch cost for that Astros would be 1500 times 2,500. We come up with about $3 million to to launch that particular payload. So, on a Falcon Heavy rocket, so but I'll stop now. Back to you.

No, that's that's valuable information, and yes, so yeah, they're cheaper and quicker turnaround, and my father actually worked for Martin Marietta, and he was he was a payload specialist for and he did payload integration for Titan III rockets. And so I know about that long ramp-up for a satellite, and how they have to configure the rocket to accommodate whatever that payload is. And whereas a balloon, it's basically, you hang the thing on a string below the envelope. And another huge advantage of balloon payloads is that the scientific instruments that are carried by balloons can be recovered after the mission is complete. And this'll allows you to get your experiment back to Earth and makes it very easy to to download your data or evaluate your engineering, or analyze the data physically, and then reuse or upgrade your equipment for future flights. So, unlike a satellite, which may go up and then it's going to probably end its admission by re-entering the atmosphere and burning up, these payloads can be returned to Earth. So, what about the history of the you know, the balloons, and of course, not even talking about the defense balloon in Roswell in 1947, but let's when we've it's been the Throughout the history of astronomy, balloons have been used for a lot of missions. The stratoscope in 1957 was the first balloon-borne telescope for astronomical observations. Capturing high-resolution images of the sun, and more recently, missions like Boomerang and Gusto, or Gusto, I think you mentioned Gusto of used the balloons to study the cosmic microwave background, and the process of star formation. And so, essentially, these are radio telescopes. And the I guess I had this listed as an upcoming mission, but it actually happened back in, 2013, the Astros mission. I used a balloon board telescope to create 3D maps of star-forming region and study stellar feedback. So, these are some of the missions that are the things that they're doing, and one of the things that balloons do really well with is doing gamma ray sensing. And so this brings us to kind of citizen science, is that balloons are actually in the affordability range of citizen scientists, where an amateur can actually loft a balloon with a payload and do some science. So, Mike, you want to talk a little bit about some of these citizen science projects that are using balloons?

Oh, sorry, Joe, I'm here. I'm here. Yeah. So, I apologize, I had my mic muted. So, before I jump into the citizen science, I just want to say two other things. The ASTROS mission has not launched yet, according to the NASA websites. It was scheduled back in 2023. But, from what I can tell, that is still pending. That's the one I mentioned that was 8.5 foot wide telescope at 5,500 pounds. The other thing that I really liked reading about was the Anita, or Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna. And they point out that not all balloon astronomy experiments look up. And that Anita looked down into the Antarctic ice sheet. During a series of month-long missions, they used radio telescopes to monitor the ice. Looking for high-energy neutrinos that are hitting ice molecules and producing a flash of radio emissions. And essentially turned the entire Antarctic continent into a giant neutrino telescope. Something that would be impossible to do from ground or from space. So I thought that was super, super fascinating. But…

Yeah, I guess that's why I was confused about that Anthros mission. Yeah, and that that and you know, the ground-based neutrino telescopes would you know, they they were, like. What they would fill a salt mine with water and put a big array of detectors in there, and hoping to see a neutrino burst. And so this was Actually, that mission over the Antarctic, you know, was a huge cost savings compared to some of these other neutrino experiments that for neutrino detection.

Yes. I think those are very, very cool instruments. So, on citizen science, because that was sort of part of the impetus of our topic here. We see regular updates on SpaceWeather.com from Earth to Sky calculus, which is a group of students who are launching space weather balloons from California to monitor cosmic rays. They've been collecting data for over a decade now and have some unique data of radiation levels in the atmosphere. They've recently recorded a significant decrease in atmospheric radiation, which hit a 10-year low last November. The decline is attributed to increased solar activity from Solar Cycle 25, which is progressing faster than expected. This is a little counterintuitive. We think if the sun is active, shouldn't we be receiving more solar radiation? Well, we're also measuring cosmic rays from deep in space. And the sun's intensified magnetic field, and the CMEs themselves are repelling cosmic rays from deep space, leading to an overall drop in the amount of radiation that is reaching the Earth. Cosmic rays are a form of space weather that have a direct impact on Earth. They can alter the atmospheric chemistry. They can trigger lightning and even reach commercial aircraft. There is research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that links cosmic rays to higher rates of cancer among flight crews. And some studies that are controversial and suggest a connection between cosmic rays and an increased risk of cardiac issues. So, having this data is has consequences for us here on Earth. And the solar cycles have consequences for us, our health, here on Earth.

Yeah.

So, I think that's that's what I've got on citizen science. Do you have anything else left on this topic, Jay?

Yeah, I just wanted to, you know. The talk about the allure of actually sending a balloon up, and I was involved with a couple guys, and we'd seen this YouTube video of people just basically getting a large weather balloon. Purchasing one, and stringing a GoPro camera and a radio transponder on it and then releasing it over the California desert. And basically, getting their little GoPro camera doing images of from space. And so I was like, you mean I can send my GoPro to space? Or near space. Yeah, so I was really excited to actually do this. And as a side note on the Earth-to-sky calculus balloons that they send up for that you just mentioned with Earth Science, one of the things that they do is they send up small pieces of jewelry, or or like commemorative coins and that sort of thing. And they send them up with a balloon, and they take a picture of that piece of jewelry in space, where you can see the black sky and the stars and the curvature of the Earth and everything. And then they recover that. And then they use that for fundraising to continue their balloon mission. And so you can buy these, you know, like, a necklace that has been to quote-unquote space. And so, that was, you know, so that's kind of the commercial application of balloons. And then another thing is, so I'm still fascinated by this idea, although it is, you know, it's kind of you'd have to kind of have a good discretionary budget, you know, you're talking about maybe, you know, $3,000 to $4,000 for the balloon, and then the radio transponder, and all the equipment. And then actually, helium costs have gone skyrocketed because there's such a helium shortage on Earth. And there's also kind of a little bit of an ethical issue of whether you want to, you know. Use your use what's little left. Helium there is left on Earth for fun. And so, anyway, um, so one of the things I always wanted to do is actually do one of the launch one of these balloons to near space. And nowadays, I would use a 360-degree camera. And so that when the balloon gets to its maximum altitude, the expansion of the gases inside of it would usually burst the balloon. And then there's a little parachute that's strung down below the balloon. And once it starts the payload starts falling back down through the atmosphere, and there becomes enough air, then the parachute deploys, and you can recover your payload, and if you have a radio transponder there, you can basically search it down. And so, I've always wanted to do this with a 360 camera, so that, you know, some of the GoPro footage is, you know, where the GoPro camera starts spinning, and...And it basically turns into a nauseating video to see that, but if you use a 360 camera, you can stabilize that image and make it so that it is actually a stable image of your trip to space, as it were. And I found it interesting, I think I saw it yesterday on one of Bezos' launches, that when they reach their apogee, they basically threw out the window a 360 camera so that it took images of the rocket re-entering or descending, as it were. But I'll have to look at that article a little bit more in depth. It was just something that came across my social media that I thought was interesting. So, anything else on balloons there, Mike?

Well, I did want to mention the NASA Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, which launched about 650 balloons during the last total eclipse in April of 2024. And they were launched by undergraduate science and engineering students from more than 75 institutions from all points along the path of totality. And this isn't exactly citizen science, because it is funded by the NASA and the National Science Foundation, but it was giving students an opportunity to develop and launch balloons with instruments that were making measurements of the atmospheric column underneath the path of totality. Basically looking at how the moon's shadow was perturbing the atmosphere. And they've got a nice website with videos. I think it's a very cool and we'll include a link to that. You can see some of these videos of cameras launched from the balloons.

All right, yeah, we'll include a link for that. Well, we want to thank all of our listeners for checking out this podcast, and be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and let us know what you'd like to hear more about. You can also check out our individual websites at wildernessVagabonds.com for Mike's site and Skylapser.com for my site. And if you'd like to help us out, to maybe afford a balloon mission, you can buy us a coffee at [buymeacoffee.com/skylapser](https://buymeacoffee.com/skylapser). The intro music is fanfare for Space by Kevin McLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer, and...

Mike Lewinski.

Wishing you all clear skies.