Welcome to the StarCast for the week of August 3rd, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, and with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinski.

Let's take a look at space weather from SpaceWeather.com. Mike, what's happening with the sun over the next couple of days?

**Mike L.:** Hi, Jay. There is a pretty interesting video on the SpaceWeather.com website right now, titled, "A Giant Magnetic Spider." This is showing movement between two cores of Sunspot 4167 with magnetic fibrils that are stretching out and pulsing. It's really a very fascinating video. I encourage all of our listeners to take a look at the SpaceWeather.com archive for August 3rd to see this video. Otherwise, the sun has been pretty quiet this week. Geomagnetic storm probabilities for mid-latitudes are a mere 10% for the next 48 hours of active conditions. For anything better than that, we're looking at just a 1% chance. Even folks up at high latitudes have a best-case 20% chance of aurora in the next 2 days, so things are pretty quiet for the moment.

**Jay Shaffer:** Okay, well, let me tell you what's happening in the night sky this week. Just this morning, astronomers watched an inky dot cross the face of Saturn. It was the shadow of Saturn's moon, Titan. The Saturn-Titan eclipse is a fairly rare event, and it only occurs about every 15 years or so. So, maybe take a look online and see if you can pull up some video of that eclipse of Saturn. Otherwise, in the night sky this week, it's relatively uneventful compared to what next week is going to be, where we will see a planetary conjunction, the Perseid meteor shower, and a full moon. So, stay tuned for more details on that next week.

In space news, Congress is giving some hope to space scientists. Even though the Trump administration is preparing to implement massive budget cuts to NASA and the National Science Foundation, Congress is pushing back by proposing budget drafts that would keep funding at or near current levels. The Senate draft, in particular, explicitly calls for continued funding of numerous missions that the White House has targeted for cancellation, including the Veritus Venus Orbiter, Lunar Gateway, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. These drafts are seen as a strong rebuke of the White House's proposed cuts, with members of Congress and space advocacy groups arguing that such drastic reductions in funding would hinder scientific progress and damage U.S. leadership in space. Despite this congressional support, the administration is already instructing NASA to prepare for the cuts, leading to protests from scientists and employees who worry about the premature brain drain and long-term impact on the space program. So, possibly some good news. What's this week's topic, Mike?

**Mike L.:** Jay, this week we're going to talk about the Crestone Crater. This is a geologic formation that is just about 3 miles east of where I'm sitting right now, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos. It's actually inside the boundary of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and there has been some controversy over the years as to the cause of this crater. Some people believe that it could be a meteor. It was first discovered in 1934, and people related it at the time to a fireball that supposedly crashed to the ground in 1892. Some studies were conducted starting in 1941. A geologist, Dr. Nininger from Denver, used aerial photographs and searched the ground for meteorite fragments. He did some drilling and was unable to find any strong evidence of a meteor, but nonetheless concluded that this must be the cause. We're proposing that maybe this was an icy comet fragment that would not have left metallic material. If so, that would make it extremely unique. I don't believe we have any other evidence of cometary fragments striking the Earth.

**Jay Shaffer:** On that, and it was also, when they were talking about the cometary fragments, it's kind of like the old ice bullet murder mystery thing, where the evidence disappears. Also, this is unique and anomalous because it's in sand, and so there's not a whole bunch of evidence of any other either whether it's meteorite or a comet fragment striking sand and what those characteristics would be of in a deep sand area like that.

**Mike L.:** Jay, we see lightning strikes in the dunes all the time, and they typically form what are called fulgurites or lightning fossils. The lightning hits the sand and fuses the sand grains into glass and creates the impression of the bolt where it struck the sand. So, even if this were a fragment of ice from a comet that were to hit the Earth, I would be very surprised if it did not have enough kinetic energy to fuse sand and create something that would be apparent.

I've also looked at some of the LIDAR data that has been created for this area. This is not just a single feature. There are some other adjacent structures that have a sort of crater-like look within a one-mile radius. When you look at the LIDAR, all of the terrain biological features disappear, and you're just kind of looking at the subsurface features of the area, surface and subsurface. As I look at the LIDAR that was done back in 2012, I start to think that this has got a more geological origin. There's a paper that I'm looking at that was presented at the annual conference that is held on sand dunes on Earth, and it really, the adjacent features all look very similar in character. This one happens to be a little more pronounced. The proposed hypothesized geological origins would include Aeolian or wind processes, as well as paraglacial processes. This area was glaciated in the past, and you can get a kind of permafrost that creates a cap if you have an artesian spring. They kind of well up underneath the permafrost, creates a kind of an ice dome from fresh groundwater that is flowing upward and reaching the permafrost and then freezing. And over time, that can melt, and then you have subsidence that occurs.

The other proposal from the Great Sand Dunes National Park scientists, they would call a sand boil. And this would be a case where you had water, subsurface water that effectively liquefies and pushes sand up to the surface in a single point, say through a crack, and this can form what sometimes are called sand volcanoes. And typically, the top of that has a small crater feature in it. The crater itself is about 100 meters in diameter. It sinks to a depth of 10 meters, and then the ridge around it is about 10 meters high. If this were a cometary crater, it would be one of the smallest we've ever recorded.

All of this put together really, to me, points to a terrestrial source, and I just note that none of these papers have brought up the possibility of Shai-Hulud, the sandworm of Baracas. I mean, are we not going to look for a giant sandworm, perhaps?

**Jay Shaffer:** I was actually there in 2018 and walked around the crater and did some photography and video of it. Then I'd heard about it, and I wanted to kind of look at it myself. In the center of the crater, they have some drill casings from when they had done some core samples of them. Like you said, they had not found anything metallic or any of that volcanic glass that would have been typical from an impact. Another thing is that if you look, like you said, looking at the LIDAR and some of the features around there, dunes often form into these crescents, and you can look at dune structure all over the world where it can basically look like a crescent, and if you kind of close that crescent up, it then turns into a circular formation like what would be with the crater. I would think and probably agree with you that the most likely thing is an Aeolian feature or an Aeolian phenomena or a wind-driven phenomena. Have you actually gone down there and walked around?

**Mike L.:** I have not, but after this episode, I think I'm gonna take a little trip over there and just get a sense for it myself.

**Jay Shaffer:** It's actually pretty impressive when you're coming down the dirt road there, and you kind of get an overview of it, and I can see why people were impressed by it, and the very first impression would be that it was a crater. Then there's the issue of the unknown fireball and whether or not there is a meteorite someplace else close by in the San Luis Valley. So that's another kind of issue with that, is that they did have that reported fireball in 1892, and it was fairly widely reported as far away as Saguache and Alamosa, so that would be pretty interesting if they did actually find one. What about alien spacecraft landing or a crater from a rocket?

**Mike L.:** That is a very popular theory here. We have a lot of UFO fans and alien believers in Crestone, so I suspect if I were to just take a survey of a dozen of my neighbors at random, I would get at least four alien life theories. I have neighbors who tell me they see aliens or they see UFO craft nightly, so I don't know why my time lapses aren't picking them up, but it's almost a religious belief here.

**Jay Shaffer:** That's why they call them Crestoners. It would be a great opportunity for you to get down there and maybe do a time-lapse from within the crater. That would be a kind of a cool thing. What would really be cool is to get down there and do an all-sky so that we can see the 180-degree rim of the crater. So that's the story about the mysterious Crestone Crater, and you can actually visit the crater by going to Crestone, Colorado. There's a road that goes out through there, and it's just barely within the boundary of the Great Sand Dunes National Park on the northern boundary, and there's a gate there that leads to a hiking trail that goes into the Great Sand Dunes, but it would be difficult to get to it from the main entrance of the Great Sand Dunes National Park, which is probably 10 miles to the south of there.

**Mike L.:** That's right, and I would add that's the Liberty Gate Trailhead and Liberty Road. There is a trail that skirts the foothills and goes to the dunes, and it passes through the ghost town of Duncan, where you can actually rent a small cabin from the Park Service for overnight camping. So, it's probably about 7 miles from the trailhead to the base of the dunes, so that's a good solid trip. If you're out and back, that's almost 15 miles in one day, so I think for a backpacking trip to look for ghosts and aliens and meteors, it's a nice trip for a lot of folks.

**Jay Shaffer:** Yeah, well, maybe you and I have to do that sometime, but I think I would need a mule to haul my backpack.

**Mike L.:** Me too.

**Jay Shaffer:** All right, I want to thank all of our listeners for checking out our podcast today. Please 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 and Skylapser.com for me. If you'd like to help us out, you can always buy us a cup of coffee at [buymeacoffee.com/skylapser](https://buymeacoffee.com/skylapser). The intro music for our podcast is Fanfare for Space by Kevin McLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Schaefer and Mike Lewinski, wishing you all clear skies.