Welcome to the **StarCast** for the week of October 4th, 2025. I'm your host, **Jay Shaffer**, and with me is my co-host, **Mike Lewinski**. How you doing, Mike? Oh, great, we're having a kind of a blustery, rainy day down here with high wind. You may hear that, you might actually hear the wind in the background. I'm doing great, how are you, Jay? From my office, it's really howling out there. Let's take a look at space weather. Speaking of weather, from SpaceWeather.com. Mike, what's up with the sun over the next couple days? Well, there was an **M-Class solar flare** that has sent a **CME** toward Earth. Nasa models predict that it is going to strike Earth around **October 8th**. Although it's a minor CME, it could spark a good geomagnetic storm, thanks to the **Russell McFerrin effect**. So, keep your eye out for that coming up next Wednesday. Is the estimate. And in the next 24 to 48 hours here in mid-latitudes, we have about a **40% chance of active conditions** and seeing some sort of solar activity. Very low chance of a severe storm, only 1%. But if you get up to high latitudes, the chances of a severe storm do jump up to 55%. So, if you're up around the Arctic Circle or somewhere far enough north, you might keep an eye out for Northern Lights. So what's happening in the night sky this week, Jay? Well, it's kind of all about the **moon** this week, the **Full Moon** arrives late Monday at about 11:48 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And usually, the first Full Moon in October is traditionally known as the **Hunter's Moon**. This year, however, it earns two extra titles. It's both a **Supermoon** and the 2025 **Harvest Moon**. It's a Supermoon because it occurs near the **perigee**, or the moon's closest point to Earth. And it makes it appear slightly larger and brighter than average, and though the effect might be pretty subtle. But I noticed it in my telescope a lot of times, that with the field of view, when we have a Supermoon, it's actually almost… doesn't fit into the field of view, sometimes, of my telescope. It's taking the Harvest Moon title this year, because it's the Full Moon occurring closest to the autumnal equinox. So the Harvest Moon is always named that, because it appears closest to the equinox. And usually that actually happens in September, but this year, it's in October. Adding to the spectacle, the moon will cross in front of several stars of the **Pleiades cluster** this on Thursday and Thursday night, or Friday morning. And this will create a series of **occultations**, visible to many observers across North America, so you can see the stars, for example, **Elektra** in the Pleiades will be occulted by the moon, so look, depending on your location, look right around midnight Thursday night, or just after midnight on Friday morning. Now let's take a look at some space news. Mike? --- ## Space News and Direct Observation Yeah, Jay, and before I jump into our news, I want to just mention that last night, during my time lapse, I captured a **moon bow**. So that was a rainbow that was created with moonlight. And so we're waxing gibbous moon phase, still a couple days away from Full Moon. But it was bright enough, and there was some rain going on. In fact, it was a little nerve-wracking running a time lapse with cameras outdoors. But I was rewarded with a moonbow that lasted for a few minutes, and it was a fairly bright one. This is only the second time I've ever managed to capture this phenomenon, so it's somewhat rare. You do need a pretty near Full Moon to have enough light to actually create the rainbow. And then, of course, you need the conditions of clearing sky in one direction with some rain or **Virga** in between you and the Moon, so… Kind of excited about that. So, over to… Yeah. Wow, I was just gonna say, now I have to go check my cameras and see if I caught that. We're getting that rainstorm right now, so… But… but… Okay, so on to space news. Right? Yes, a newly discovered asteroid designated **2025 TF** made an extremely close approach to Earth at 12:49 Universal Time on October 1st. Reaching a nominal distance of **.02 LD**. That's the **lunar distance**, or the distance between the center of the Earth and the center of the Moon. This places it approximately 6,800 kilometers, or **4,200 miles** from Earth's center, exactly 4,220 miles, to be precise. And that'll matter in a moment. That's equivalent to about 419 kilometers, or 260 miles above the surface over Antarctica. At this distance, it is now classified as the **second closest asteroid flyby ever recorded**. The newly discovered 2025 TF is ranked as this… oop. I have some duplication here, sorry. Since January 1st, 2025. Observatories worldwide have detected **118 asteroids** passing within one lunar distance of Earth, including this one. In September this year alone, there were **25 asteroids** that passed within one lunar distance of Earth. And I would say that the asteroid that holds the record is **2020 VT4**. And that past 4,190 miles from the Earth Center on November 13th, 2020. So that was about 30 miles closer than the one that we had here on October 1st. 2025 TF was discovered, or first observed at the Kitt Peak Bach Observatory in Arizona at 6:36 a.m. Universal Time on October 1st. **Less than 6 hours after its closest approach**, so we detected that after it had already passed by. And this object belongs to the **Apollo group of asteroids**, and has an estimated diameter of between **1.2 and 2.7 meters**, that's about 4 to 9 feet. It flew past Earth at a relative speed of 20.9 kilometers per second, or 46,700 miles per hour. A lot of these near-Earth objects are being discovered by **amateur observers**, and that brings us to our topic. Today, we want to talk about **confirming reality through direct observation**. In other words, knowing something is real by imaging it, or observing it yourself. So, over to you, Jay. Yeah, we read about it, and we see all these incredible images online. And you kind of get detached from reality when we see, for example, the **Pillars of Creation** from the Hubble's telescope, or you see a nebula, or you see these pictures of **Andromeda**. And if you're experiencing it through media, you don't really have a connection with that to reality. And so there's a unique and powerful satisfaction in confirming these realities through your own eyes. In other words, seeing these things for yourself. And that is why so many of us are kind of drawn toward **amateur astronomy** and **astrophotography**. We can look up at the night sky, and there's light that you're seeing from a distant star, left it a thousand years ago, and that's a staggering intellectual concept. It becomes a **visceral, undeniable truth** when you're at the use of a telescope, or looking through the viewfinder of a camera, and you are actually witnessing those photons that left that star or galaxy many, many thousands of years ago, and you experience it for yourself. There's a galaxy, say, the **Andromeda Galaxy, M31**. It's a faint, fuzzy smudge in your small telescope. You've seen the Hubble image, but the moment your eye registers that light, that ancient signal, you're not just reading a fact, you're **confirming it**. You're the second witness to its existence right after the telescope mirror or your camera's lens. You've personally verified that there is a massive collection of billions of stars over two million light-years away. So, this is kind of your personal experience, and you are basically the first person in the universe to see those particular photons. And so that kind of brings us to astrophotography, and why do we go through all the trouble of buying the gear, setting up, tracking, worrying about the weather, battling the dew, and spending hours of processing our images. It's because the resulting image is your **personal, irrefutable evidence**. I used to be, well, I still kind of… when I… I don't really pursue deep space objects, per se, and do a lot of astronomy for deep space objects, and the reason being is that there's so many other images out there that have been created by so many other people that have so much, larger investment in both telescopes and astrophotography equipment. And, of course, there's the space telescopes and all those things. And so they can image those things tens, if not thousands, times better than I can. But there's kind of a disconnect with reality there. And for a while, what I would do to image these deep space objects, is I would actually log on to a **remote telescope** and buy time on the remote telescope and say, okay, capture the images of Andromeda, for example, M31, for myself. And so that I would have that telescope capture those images, and then I would download that data and process it myself, and that gave it kind of a **personal connection** to that image, whether I could have just as easily paid $5 and bought a high-resolution image of Andromeda, imaged by somebody else, but that kind of made it personal and brought it to my own reality. So, when you capture, like, a vibrant nebula, like the **Orion Nebula**, you're not just printing an image you found. You're creating a **document of reality** that you've actually personally witnessed. You've directed that camera toward a specific spot in the sky and pulled the signal out of the darkness that your unaided eye couldn't perceive. The color, the complex gas structure, that's real, and you've confirmed that existence and structure using your own instruments. It's the kind of the ultimate way of saying, **I saw it myself**. And this is also like, navigating the night sky is kind of an abstraction if you're just look at it from afar, or you're looking at a planar sphere, is you don't really have a connection to where something is in the sky. So, for example, where exactly do I look for the Orion Nebula, or where do I look for the **Eagle Nebula** to see the Pillars of Creation. And once you image it yourself, you know kind of where that is in the night sky, and you can even look up at the night sky and say, ah, I know that the Eagle Nebula is right about there. So, it **grounds abstract scientific concepts** in the tangible personal experience, and it moves from, I believe what scientists say, to say, **I know it's there, because I have the data, and I took the picture**. And so, that's basically acting as confirmation. So, Mike, how do you feel about this? And have you kind of have the same kind of emotional experience that I have in confirming reality by observation? Yeah, absolutely, Jay. I am always very excited to see something new for the first time that I had not seen before, to learn about it. So it goes both ways. There are phenomenon that I've read about and heard about, and then I get to go out and see it for myself. And then there are other phenomena that are known about that I simply haven't encountered before, and I get to discover by photographing something new and researching exactly what that is. A couple stories that I've related on recent podcasts. The first one dates back to the late 90s. I was outside with my 8-inch homemade Newtonian, and all of a sudden, all the dogs in the neighborhood started barking. And we saw what we thought was, or what appeared to be, a comet traveling across the sky. And the problem was, and I knew immediately that comets don't appear to travel, not within moment to moment. Usually it's fixed up there. And this was, had a tail. But it was moving, and all the dogs in the neighborhood saw it at the same time, and they all started barking, or at least a couple of them saw it and started barking, and that set everybody else off. And I had my telescope. I was able… it was moving fast enough that I could not really track it with the main tube, but I was able to use my finder scope to look at it. And that didn't help me much. The finder scope just didn't give me enough additional resolution to with any certainty say what I was looking at. So, this is still, we're talking probably about 1998, and so the internet was still an early phenomenon. But I turned to one of the used groups for astronomy. And said, hey, I saw this thing last night around this time, this is what it looked like. And I got responses back from around the world. Some of them were a little fantastic. Somebody thought I was discovering or observing some micro comet thing that they had a personal theory about. But several people correctly identified this as being the time at which the **space shuttle was executing a water dump**. So, another case that was like this, where I saw something and I didn't know what it was, was I mentioned on a recent episode, I saw what I thought might be a daytime supernova, and this was in our balloon episode. I pulled out my telephoto lens and started taking pictures, and I knew within a few moments of looking at the photo that, no, this is not a supernova. It's a **balloon**. And it only appears to be stationary because it's moving fairly slowly. So, to go with things that I have directly observed myself that I knew about. The most exciting is undoubtedly **Sprite Lightning**. I don't think we've done a whole show on sprites yet, or I've forgotten it if we did. But I had set up a camera that was modified with the infrared cutoff filter removed. I was doing a night time lapse, as I do. This was back in 2012 or 2013. And I went out to change batteries. I checked the focus after I touched the camera, because I may have bumped focus. And I saw a little red smudge in the frame, and I really wrote it off. I thought, oh, there's a lens flare from a light somewhere, and it's no big deal. The next morning, I watch my time lapse, and I knew immediately that it was, in fact, a whole series of Sprite Lightning strikes that were captured. And I corresponded with another amateur astronomer, **Thomas Ashcraft**, in Santa Fe, who had photographed the exact same sprites that I had photographed. Now, he uses very different types of equipment. He had much better photos than I did, but he could tell me that, oh, those… that was a storm that was over the Oklahoma panhandle. And it was… it was really exciting to not only, for the first time capture sprites, but to even have a fellow observer that I could discuss it with. --- ## The Prepared Observer and Personal Confirmation Yeah, I… yeah, so… yeah, that's one of the things that I just I wanted to bring that up while it's kind of on the tip of my mind there, is that one of the things that, when I first met you, is that we were both kind of… I realized that you were a **good observer**. And so, often you'll have people that will come up to you and say, oh, I saw something last night that was really strange. Can you tell me what it was? And that's not being a good observer. And being a good observer is being able to say, I saw this to the **southeast at 10:22 p.m.**, and about **30 degrees elevation**, and it was **red**. And so, I just wanted to interject there that being a good observer, and documenting what you observe, when you see something like that, and then being able to confirm that with other scientific data is also an important aspect of this observing reality for yourself. Yes, and it's a great point there, and I just want to throw in, because I was. I was mentioning the fellow sprite observer, Thomas Ashcroft, we'll include in our links. An interview with him on the New Mexico PBS show *Calores*. He opens with the quote from, I believe, **Francis Bacon**, "If chance favors the prepared observer." And Thomas's question is, "If Chance does favor the prepared observer, how does the observer prepare? How can I generate clearer perception?" And it's a great interview, and you can learn more about Sprites following through on that link. A couple other things I just want to mention on this topic. The observations of the **SAR Arc**. Observations of the, what they're now calling the, **SpaceX Aurora**. That one in particular was for me an entirely new discovery. And really has only been known about for the last two years at most to science, mostly because there weren't as many SpaceX launches up until the pace really picked up a couple years ago. And these are things that I capture and then have to go investigate to find out just what… what could this be? And I don't always get a satisfactory answer when I capture some new phenomenon, or it doesn't come as quickly as I would like. I'll give you another example of direct observation that I think was meaningful to me. A mutual friend of ours, Matt Litt, had texted me one night to say that he saw this **strange white glow in the sky** that appeared to be slowly moving. And I went outside, and sure enough, I could see this diffuse white cloud. It was clearly glowing. It was not… there was no source of illumination. And it was moving and traveling and distorting a little bit as it traveled. And we eventually pieced together that this was **propellant that was dispersed or ejected from a SpaceX Falcon launch**. And it took a bit of research to nail down exactly what that was. And even at the point of having come up with a likely answer. I still… I couldn't be 100% sure, it could have been something else. And so, I have over the two years since then. On a number of occasions. Followed the launch schedule out of the **Vandenberg Space Force Base** in California. Because that's where the Falcon launches are most likely to be visible to me. And it is to the point that I am able to go outside at night. With the live launch audio on my phone. I'll tune in to the SpaceX channel, and play the countdown, and I'll stand out there with my camera. Looking to the west. Waiting, and I'll hear that we have ignition, we have a successful launch. And at some point in the 5 to 10 minutes after that happens, the rocket is at an altitude where I am starting to see the **propellant trail**. And it does depend on the particular direction that the rocket is heading, if they've launched. West over the Pacific. It's traveling away from me, and I'm highly unlikely to see it at all. But if it's heading east. Or sometimes south. I have a pretty good chance of seeing it, and so, there is an example of a very direct observation of something where. I can connect the audio broadcast from SpaceX to what I see in the sky, and I know that it takes it about 5 minutes to escape the Earth's atmosphere and be up at an altitude where. That's 600 miles away, the propellant plume is now going to be visible to me. And I've seen enough of these now to know. What those plumes look like. They're not identical every time. They can be different shaped, or different intensity, but they have a general characteristic that I now feel confident that that first. Sighting that Matt alerted me to. Was, in fact, almost certainly a rocket launch propellant. So, I think the last two points that have to do with direct observation are. The first one I want to talk about has to do with **persistent contrails** released by aircraft. And the fact that I'm doing time lapses day and night. And I have known and lived amongst. Many people who have. Some degree of belief in the **chemtrail conspiracy**. And I have come at this with a skeptical mind of. How do I know that what I'm seeing are persistent contrails left. As a consequence of burning jet fuel. And not actual chemicals being sprayed deliberately. And the one is unavoidable because. When hot jet exhaust meets cold air. We get condensation, and of course, most of the jet exhaust is, in fact, water. So we get not just. Not just condensation of existing water in the air, but also of the. Ejected water. And there are a number of different ways of. Looking at and investigating this. And I've done, for example, the reception of aircraft **ADS-B signals**. So that I could help. For my own purposes, directly identify. What plane is that? Is this a military flight? Is this a commercial flight? And then, where did it originate? Where is it headed to? And so, being able to identify the type of plane. And origin and destination tells me a little bit. But seeing how contrails persist or don't persist. In relation to the other clouds that are there already or not there already. And what we see in particular is there are. What they call **orographic formations**. Or ORA is based on the word for mountain. And you get an uplift that occurs where. Clouds, where air masses are passing over a mountain range. And the warmer, lower air gets pushed up to a higher. Elevation, where it is cooler. And that often causes the. Creation of clouds that happen right over. The mountain range, and they often persist. We get wave clouds that persist. And what we often see. And I'm sure you've seen this in your time lapses, is that. You'll have a relatively clear day, but as planes pass over a range. There will be persistence right over the range itself. A contrail will form and persist. And it wasn't there before it got to the mountain, and it disappeared after it passed over the range. And this is pretty much the same thing that we see. With naturally occurring standing wave clouds or **lenticular clouds**. It just happens that the ambient air is not. Moist enough to create a cloud on its own. And why would it be that every commercial jet passing over this range is leaving a short, persistent contrail only when it goes over the mountain range? And then you watch the time lapse. And an hour later, suddenly, there is. A lenticular cloud that is forming out of thin air. Because there's now enough moist air passing over. I will also say that one of the things that I noticed in my time lapses is. From time to time. I see two or even three layers of clouds that are moving. In completely different directions. We have low clouds that are moving to the east. But then there's a mid-level clouds that are moving. Moving to the South, and then there's an upper layer of clouds. That are moving to the north, and. You start to understand a little bit more that the air above us is not a homogenous. Column of air traveling in the same direction at the same temperature and the same humidity. But in fact, that there are **layers**. And what happens at one level may be completely different when you ascend by another 1,000 feet. And so it's very, very difficult to predict when contrails will persist. And this is something that even the military has struggled with, because. Stealth fighters may still leave contrails, and that's not very stealthy. The last point that I want to make is with direct observation of the night sky, and. Again, related to the conspiracy theory world. This time with **Flat Earth**. You start doing time-lapse videos. Day or night after night. Week after week, month after month. And year after year. And I've been at this now for 13 years. Since 2012, my first night time lapse. As many nights as I could possibly. Do it. And so I've gotten to see. Consequences of the Earth. Going through the motions of the year with regard to the tilt. To the sun, and the solar, I'm sorry, the galactic plane. Or the solar system plane. And so, I get to. I get to observe the recurrent. **Zodiacal light** that we talked about, I think, last week or the week before, that happens. Both at the spring and fall equinox, or around there. And this has given me. An **intuitive feel** for. How the earth moves. Both **rotating** and **orbiting**. And of course, observing and time-lapsing **lunar eclipses**. A sense for the **shape of the Earth**. I get that from compiling **star trails** and looking at the pull and circumpolar. Star Trails, and understanding that, yes, the Earth is, in fact. Rotating, and that's what the motion that I see, or apparent motion that I see. Around the **Polestar**. And I'll wrap it up here, because we're just about out of time. But I want to make one last point about direct observation, and that is that. We talk about the **precession of Polaris**. And that our North Pole star is not going to be our pole star forever. Over tens of thousands, that changes. And it is not precisely. The Polestar. And one night, I was setting up a. Time lapse. I had a kind of cool old TV antenna. And I wanted to pinpoint the TV antenna. So that the top of the mast was. Pointed directly at Polaris so that I would have this. Star Trail image with. The antenna centered on Polaris. And I learned, because I made this time lapse. The Polaris's a little hair a degree off. From the actual celestial pole. Because. And I had to reshoot it the next night to get the exact positioning that I really wanted. It was close to. First night, but I'm like, oh, now I need to…First night, but I'm like, oh, now I need to just go over by a degree in this direction, and then I nailed it the next night. So... That's kind of my take on this. I think it's just very important for us to hone our skills of observation, and to be willing to confirm the reality that is reported to us in media, for ourselves. Yeah, it reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes quote: once you get rid of the impossible, you're left with the truth. And so, just briefly, real quickly, we're gonna be running out of time. And also, for example, the conspiracy theory that man never landed on the moon, and of course, we can confirm that through observation by using a laser aimed at a reflector that we have footage of the astronaut placing that reflector on the surface of the moon. And so that's... and so you can do scientific confirmation of a reality to debunk some of these conspiracy theories as well. Okay, so, I 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. And you can also check out our personal websites at WildernessVagabonds.com for Mike's, Skylapser.com for mine. And, of course, you can check out our show links for information that we've done through the podcast. And if you'd like to help us out, you can buy us a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/skylapser. The intro music is "Fanfare for Space" by Kevin McCloud from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Space 9 Observatory, this is Jay Shaffer, and wishing you all clear skies. Mike Lewinski.