Welcome to the StarCast for the week of September 28th, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski. [Jay Shaffer] Good morning, Mike. Let's take a look at space weather from spaceweather.com. What's up with the sun over the next couple days, Mike? [Mike L.] Good morning, Jay. [Mike L.] Well, Jay, our NOAA forecast estimates a 55% chance of an M-class flare over the next 48 hours, and a 5% chance of an X-class flare over the next 48 hours. As far as geomagnetic storms are concerned, here at the mid-latitudes, we have about a 30% chance of active conditions, which is the lowest level of geomagnetic storm, and it drops off from there. Not even worth mentioning. At the high latitudes, there is a 30% chance of minor geomagnetic storm, and 45% chance of a severe storm. So if you're up north, you might want to look up and keep an eye out for Aurora. So, what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay? [Jay Shaffer] Great. Well, great. Yeah, so, this, the first quarter moon is tomorrow, and that will be about at 23:54 UTC, or Universal Time, so that would make it somewhere around about 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday, the 29th. And then, this week is also a good time to see the Zodiacal Light in the morning. The zodiacal light is kind of like a cone of light that appears in the morning sky, pre-dawn sky. And it may be visible before the morning twilight in the northern hemisphere for observers with dark skies. Look for the star **Regulus**, the brightest star in the constellation **Leo the Lion**, because it sits almost exactly on the ecliptic, the centerline of the zodiac. And the tip of this cone of light points right toward the bright star of Regulus. And, the newly discovered **comet swan 2B** is still in the news. We're, it's getting both brighter and setting later, so if you want to see this comet, look southwest with binoculars or with a camera just after sunset in the Northern Hemisphere. And it may actually be visible to the naked eye here in the next couple days, so I would definitely keep an eye out for it. Now let's take a look at some space news. Mike? [Mike L.] Yeah, Jay, before I jump into that, I just wanted to point out that the **zodiacal light** is visible twice a year for us, and in the fall, it appears in the morning, just before dawn. And it's sometimes called a **false dawn**. Whereas in the spring, we would see it in the west, just after sunset. And that's caused by sunlight scattering off of **interplanetary dust**, and it just happens to be most visible to us around the spring and fall equinox. So, yes, over this space news. Did you want to add something there? [Jay Shaffer] Oh, I was just gonna say, yeah, that means that both of us will probably be aiming our time lapses toward the east here in the next couple days. [Mike L.] Yes, yes. So, in space news, one of the final significant scientific launches of 2025, NASA has launched a trio of missions last Wednesday, September 24th, to study the sun and crucial space weather phenomena. A primary payload is the **Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe** that is tasked with investigating the complex interactions between solar wind and the local interstellar medium at the edge of our solar system. Accompanying it is the **Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1**, or **SWFO-L1** mission, that will provide us real-time operational monitoring of space weather to enhance forecasting and protect infrastructure on Earth and in orbit. And finally, the **Carruthers Geocorono Observatory** will focus its instruments on capturing views of Earth's **geocorona**. That's the faint ultraviolet glow from the outermost layer of our atmosphere to better understand its response to solar activity. And that's our space news. Today for our topic, we're going to talk about **birds**. [Jay Shaffer] Wait a minute, I thought this was an astronomy podcast. What do birds have to do with astronomy, Mike? [Mike L.] Well, Jay, it turns out that many species of birds that do a biannual migration do that migrating during the nighttime. And that they use the **stars to help navigate**. [Jay Shaffer] Oh. [Mike L.] So, how we've learned about this, I think we should start by talking about how we know this, because you hear something like this, it seems like a fairly extraordinary claim. We obviously can't just ask birds how they navigate. And in truth, birds will use a number of cues to navigate. So when the sun is setting, they can use the direction of the sun to orient their flight. They also have a certain amount of geomagnetic sensing. That's been shown, and we know a little bit about the organ that gives them their sense of north. However, during solar storms, that can be disrupted. And if it's a cloudy day, they're not going to have the sun to navigate by. So, they have multiple systems that can be thought of as backups to each other, and one of them is **Stellar navigation**. So, it turns out that back in the late 1960s, a behavioral ecologist by the name of **Steven Emlin** placed caged **buntings** inside of a planetarium that he was able to switch certain stars on and off in order to see how the animals reacted. At first, no matter how he tweaked the indoor sky, the buntings always tried to fly toward the stars in their migration path, based on only the artificial stars. They knew which way was north. So, the secret was discovered when the scientist blacked out **Polaris**, or the **North Star**, and everything within a 35 degree radius of Polaris. At that point, the birds became completely disoriented. So, they were, in fact, using the North Star for navigation. And he took this experiment one step better. He raised buntings inside of the planetarium, but he adjusted the planetarium software to rotate the sky around **Betelgeuse**. And in fact, these domesticated buntings now treated Betelgeuse as if it was Polaris, and used it for their navigation. So, what we see from this is that there's it's not just a sense of north geomagnetically, that they're actually observing and using what they observe as far as a **polar star** that other stars are rotating around to guide their navigation. More recently, a Russian scientist **Anna Zola Toreva** found that when **pied flycatchers** who were raised without a view of the sky came to their first migration, they could not pick the right direction. So, as juveniles, they actually have to **study the stars** before they can use them as a compass. And we are in the middle of the fall migration. These migrations are so large that they appear on radar. They're visible to our weather systems. And it's not only birds who use stars to navigate. We've detected this ability in quite a few other species. The one that I first learned about were **dung beetles**. And I think these are pretty, pretty fascinating. When a dung beetle scores a nice piece of dung, it must get it away from the other dung beetles as soon as possible, or risk having it stolen. And so, at night, the dung beetles find a stash of new dropping, and they immediately start to roll it as fast as they can, away from the central pile. And in order to avoid zigzagging and maybe running into other dung beetles who are also rolling theirs away, they **orient by the Milky Way**. They don't need a particular direction. They just simply need to know that they are traveling in a straight line. And this is demonstrated. For one thing, when the sky is cloudy, the dung beetles are just helpless. They just don't know what to do. They need to see the Milky Way in order to safely, safely get their done away. But they've done other experiments where they can put little sunglasses over the dung beetle, and then it does a zigzag and does very poorly. So… [Jay Shaffer] So dung beetles are related to astronomy, and I have to wonder what dung beetle sunglasses look like. [Mike L.] Yeah, right. Well, if you think that's funny, wait till you hear about the **Harbor Seal telescopes**. And I will include a link to this article in *Discover Magazine* that I've been sort of summarizing from here. There is a team of German researchers who trained a pair of wild **harbor seals** to peer through a tube that they call the **SEAL telescope**, and to pull their heads back when a star appears at the far end. So, this was basically just a proof of concept showing that they could, in fact, make out the glow of a star, despite having relatively poor vision. And here again, we have evidence that the seals are, in fact, using **Lodestars** while swimming to do navigating. So, and there are many, many other species in which this ability has been detected. Geese, ducks, sandhill cranes, starlings, sparrows, sea turtles, sun moths and butterflies. And some animals are using the North Star. Some animals are using **Cassiopeia** as a reference. Some are using **Ursa Major**, or the **Big Dipper**. Some birds use **Orion** for orientation. And in the southern hemisphere and around the equator, **Scorpius** and **Sagittarius** are useful for migrating birds. So, one of the upshots of this, and the important points to make here, is that during the migration time, **dark skies are even more important**. And there are organizations like **Dark Sky International** and other **Audubon Society** who are collaborating to promote **lights out for migration**. So, this is a time in particular we urge our listeners to make sure your porch lights are turned down after sunset, or overnight, so that the birds who are migrating at this time of year have the best chance. Because we know that the skies are getting brighter and brighter at night due to human **light pollution**. And this does threaten the ability of wildlife to migrate. [Jay Shaffer] So what are those, kind of, the major highways for these migrations, and what cities should be trying to be darker, as it were. [Mike L.] Yeah, in North America, we're talking pretty much the whole, the whole continent. I don't think that there's any particular cities. If you're north of the equator, you're probably going to have migrating birds. Of course, we've got birds that are traveling from as far north as the **Arctic Circle** down to the tropical areas for the winter. So, they can pass over any part of the continental United States or Europe during that migrating time. And there are other threats to migration, but I think light pollution has recently become a focus of bird advocacy groups like Audubon Society. [Jay Shaffer] Yeah, and I was just thinking about the **sea turtles in Florida** is that they have a, basically, Daytona Beach and a lot of these coastal cities in northern Florida have a period where they do a lights-out, specifically for the sea turtles to come on shore and lay their eggs. And sea turtles is another species that uses that stellar navigation that you were talking about. And they actually use the **moon phases** as well. And so what they want to do is make sure that during this, the new moon phase, or the dark moon phase, is when the sea turtles come ashore, and so they have a kind of a Coastal Lights Out policy that they implement in northern Florida's coastal cities. [Mike L.] Yes, and I will include in this podcast a link to some live radars that show where the heaviest patterns are. But again, these are the heaviest, these are the largest numbers of birds, but that doesn't mean that the areas that don't show the activity don't have migrations. It just means that the density of the birds that are migrating through there are small enough that they don't necessarily appear on radar. And I, for example, think about the sandhill cranes, which of course, we have passing over us here in the **San Luis Valley**. They're not these giant flocks of thousands and thousands of birds that would be dense enough to appear on radar, but yet, and of course, the geese, and other **Canada geese** and other waterfowl that are migrating this time of year, just because the map doesn't show them in your area doesn't mean that they're not there. [Jay Shaffer] Yeah, and yeah, and I'm sure there's also kind of **landforms** that they use for navigation as well, and so, in our case, it might be the **Rio Grande River Valley**, and of course, we all know that the **Mississippi Valley** is a huge migration route as well. [Mike L.] Yes. Yeah, one of the tragedies that happens occasionally is that a flock of birds or waterfowl are preparing to land to rest, and they see what they believe is a large body of water, and it's actually just a **parking lot** covered with a thin layer of water, and that those often result in large numbers of bird fatalities. That seems like one of those situations that, as long as there are parking lots, there's going to be fatalities from birds hitting it at a speed that they shouldn't be. And I just don't see what we do to mitigate that. So, other things that we do have control over, like our outdoor lighting, are more important. [Jay Shaffer] Oh, okay. And then, how did we find out that these birds navigate at night, and why do they migrate at night? It seems that that would be kind of more hazardous. [Mike L.] It does, and I gave you some of the information about the Professor Emlyn's research in the 60s with the caged buntings. I think that was some of the first scientific evidence demonstrating this. My speculation, and it's just speculation, is that there may be **fewer predators at night**. I think hawks are a little bit more attuned to the daylight for hunting, and I don't see a lot of evidence that hawks are active at night, but it may also be that the time windows available. And this is a great question, I'm just gonna say, I straight up don't know, but my suspicion is, is that there's they stay taking up food as long as they can in the north. And now the weather is changing, and they really need to get to the next food source as soon as possible. So, I'm gonna guess that it's partly driven by time, that there may not be a lot of food sources along the way, especially if you're a water bird and you're relying on marine animals for your food. Big parts of your migration path might be over inland, and there's just no food, so you really, it's use the energy that you have to get to the next food source before you run out of energy. [Jay Shaffer] Yeah, and that that kind of raises the question in my mind, is that if they, birds are using, for example, Polaris and the stars rotating around Polaris for navigation. I wonder if they are using that also for as a **seasonal timer**, because the stars rotate, rise earlier and later, different parts of the year. And so, for example, now is when we're seeing **Orion** rising early in the morning. And so, I wonder if that may be a cue to various species, that it is time to migrate when they see a certain constellation rise at a certain time. [Mike L.] That certainly makes sense to me. I mean, humans have done all of these behaviors as well, used stars to determine when it's time to move on to the next hunting grounds, or to plant, or to harvest, or simply for navigation, so. I think it's not unreasonable to speculate that that's happening as well. [Jay Shaffer] Yeah, and of course, in humans, you would think that there's learned behavior rather than instinctual behavior. But I, I guess that this might kind of fall into a kind of gray area of **astrology**, and that the people that believe in astrology, of course, think that the position of the stars affects our human behavior and personality, which is pretty much not been proven or anything like that, but I could see that there could be the learned behavior of, here's where the stars are. Now, looking up in the night sky and sun, when you see the horizon rising early in the morning, it's time to move south. [Mike L.] Right, exactly. I've always wondered whether or not some amount of the astrology is based on the fact that some people are born into a world that is growing and thriving, and some people are born into a world that is dying and decaying. And just based on the time of year, if our first year of life starts to really shape our personality. It seems to me, whether your experience of the world is one of growth and renewal, or death and decay, that could start to affect how you see things, and that from there, people tried to come up with explanations for this that were not based on the season, so much as, well, the stars are here, so this must mean that if you're bored at this time, you're going to have this personality temperament, but that's just idle speculation on my part. [Jay Shaffer] Yeah, and, well, one could probably do some research, and things like **changes in diet** over the course of a year. Is that your springtime diet might affect a personality more, differently than a juvenile diet. But anyway, that's a divergence from our migration story. Anyway… [Mike L.] It is. [Jay Shaffer] Okay, well, so that's what birds have to do with astronomy, and so that's really fascinating. And thank you for bringing up this topic there, Mike. As we go into fall, we can keep our eyes out for the stars and for the birds. And we want to thank all of our listeners for checking out this podcast. 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 personal websites at **wildernessVagabonds.com** and **Skylapser.com**. And look at these show notes for links to articles of things that we've discussed during the podcast. If you'd like to help us out, you can buy us a coffee at **[buymeacoffee.com/skylapser](https://buymeacoffee.com/skylapser)**. And the intro music is **Fanfare for Space by Kevin McCloud** from the YouTube Audio Library. From the **Deep Sage 9 Observatory**, this is Jay Shaffer and… [Mike L.] Mike Lewinski. [Jay Shaffer] Wishing you all clear skies.