Welcome to the Deep Sage 9 StarCast for Sunday, July 13th, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Schaefer.

And with me is my co-host, Mike Lewinsky. Let's take a look at space weather from SpaceWeather.com.

Mike, what's happening with the sun over the next couple days?

Good morning, Jay. We have a giant prominence currently over the Sun's northeastern limb, and SpaceWeather.com has a really excellent video by David Wilson from Inverness, Scotland, that shows this prominence time lapse. He describes it as a giant, four-legged beast that is shuffling along the edge of the sun, and certainly a spectacular sight. So, encourage our listeners to head over to SpaceWeather.com and see that in the archive for July 13th. For our current geomagnetic storm forecast in mid-latitudes, we have about a 35% chance of active conditions, a 20% chance of a minor storm, and only a 5% chance of a severe storm, but there is expected to be a greater chance at high latitudes where the opportunity for a severe storm is around 50% in the next day.

Okay, great. So we have a waning moon right now, and we'll have a last quarter moon this Thursday. And as far as planets go this week, we'll be able to see Mars in the evenings to the west, and Saturn and Venus in the early morning to the east. And look for Saturn right below the Moon on Wednesday morning; it should be really, really close and relatively bright. So that's what's happening in our night skies this week. In space news, as a follow-up to the newly discovered comet 3i Atlas, it may be billions of years older than our solar system. Astronomers from the University of Oxford have revealed that the interstellar comet 3i/Atlas is only the third such visitor ever spotted in our solar system. It could be as old as 7 billion years old, making it approximately 3 billion years older than our sun. Their trajectory modeling suggests that the ancient comet originated in the Milky Way's outer thick disc, a region distinct from our sun's usual galactic plane.

Mike?

Thanks, Jay. In other space news, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured a fantastic photo of a red sprite this week. Lieutenant Colonel Nicole Ayers, who has the call sign Vapor, posted a photo to X, formerly Twitter, with the caption "Just wow." As we went over Mexico and the U.S. this morning, I caught this sprite. Sprites are TLEs, or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below. We have a great view above the clouds, so scientists can use these types of pictures to better understand the formation, characteristics, and relationship of TLEs to thunderstorms. Jay, I've seen other photos of sprites taken from the ISS; this was absolutely one of the very best of them. Just fantastic. I encourage all our listeners to go take a look at that. We'll include a link in our podcast description. Also, the news story about this photo that was posted to Space.com mentions that NASA has a citizen science project called Spritetacular. That's of great interest to me. I first captured red sprites in August of 2012, completely by accident, and I've been hooked on Sprite Science and Sprite Photography ever since then. When I moved to Crestone in 2022, I've been lucky in the last three years to capture sprites on at least three different occasions in my nightly time lapses. So I am planning to submit my captures to the Spritetacular Citizen Science Project. And that leads us into our topic of the week, which is citizen science. I want to just give a little background here. When I captured my first sprites in 2012, I reached out to a man by the name of Thomas Ashcraft by email to discuss his captures. On that evening in August of 2012, there was also a really fantastic meteor, one of the longest meteors I've ever captured, that went overhead. His photo of that meteor appeared on SpaceWeather.com, so my attention was drawn to it, and I sent him an email and I said, "Hey, I just happened to capture the same meteor, and by the way, I see you capture sprites, and I caught some last night, too." We had an exchange about the storm, and he said, "Yes, that was a storm that was over Oklahoma," and "I got captures at this time, and this time, and this time," and we corroborated that we had captured the same sprites from different angles. Thomas Ashcraft has an observatory in Santa Fe, and he's been doing citizen science for a couple decades now. I think he is probably one of the most prominent and dedicated citizen scientists that I'm aware of. He's been interviewed by the New York Times, he's been featured on a PBS television show called *Colores*, which features New Mexico citizens doing art and science. It's a great interview, and I highly recommend it. His website at heliotown.com is just a treasure trove of observations and art. His amateur radio astronomy is so valuable that it has been included in papers published by NASA, and that has earned him a profile on science.nasa.gov. I encourage our listeners to check out his website and read more about amateur radio astronomy and the kinds of things that are possible.

Not only can you just go out and aim your telescope up and look at all the pretty things in the night sky, your average observer can actually contribute to our scientific knowledge. One of the earliest citizen scientist things that I had heard about was called SETI@home, or The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home. SETI is pretty famous, and they have the large, very large array of radio telescopes in southern New Mexico. The SETI@home project is basically where SETI sends you data that processes on your computer while you sleep. They're basically using your computer at home to help process their data. By using a distributed network of citizen scientists to do the network processing, they don't have to do the huge investment in server farms, and they're utilizing computers that are already basically being powered. You can actually help search for alien life as part of being a citizen scientist.

I do understand that that project is currently on hold. They're still processing some of the findings. There are many, many other projects out there that are active, and it's worth pointing out here that it doesn't require special scientific training to do something like SETI@home. Other projects include Einstein@Home and MilkyWay@Home, which are actively running today. Einstein@Home is looking for neutron stars with data from LIGO gravitational wave detectors, and MilkyWay@Home is actually creating a model of the Milky Way, attempting to generate a three-dimensional model of the stellar streams in the vicinity of the Milky Way. With these types of projects, you contribute your computing power, but there are other ways to be involved in science. For example, I can simply upload my photos, or I can even help classify the photos and thereby learn about the particular topic. I think it's worth recognizing that there's a range of possible involvement, from the very passive "I'm going to run an application on my computer when I'm not using it" to "I'm going to use my brain to interpret and look for interesting details, anomalies." I think it's awesome that we get opportunities to involve ourselves in different ways.

Yeah, and the clearinghouse, at least in my mind, is if you go to science.nasa.gov/citizen-science. We'll post a link to that in the description. There are pages of projects that you can get involved with. Just looking at the website, I see about 60 different projects that you can be involved in, and they range from being able to upload pictures of clouds at sunset or before dawn to look at noctilucent clouds. There's basically a ton of projects out there. One of the projects that I'm involved in is that I've had a specific meteor camera set up, and it's part of the Global Meteor Network. This was founded on the principle that we would leave no meteor undetected. This is an international network of these cameras. They're set up as basically an array so that they can triangulate any meteors that are entering our atmosphere. This particular project, my camera is facing north, and it records every night, and that data gets uploaded to the Global Meteor Network and published. They have a daily report of the meteors that they've been able to detect all around the world, and my neck of the woods would be northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I'm actually contributing to that project every night with a camera that I'm pretty much hands-off with. Occasionally I'll get a stern email about how my camera isn't up or operating or putting up enough data, but other than that, it's pretty much a hands-off thing. But I get to look at the data every day, and so that's one of the projects that at least I'm involved in, and I think it's very gratifying to do this kind of work.

Yeah, that's one that I hope to build a station here and get that up and running. I also am likely to soon be hosting an instrument that will help us measure the quality of the dark skies. The SQM, or Sky Quality Meter, is an instrument that one of the Dark Sky Crestone folks hosts at his house in Crestone proper, and I'm out a ways, so we're looking to put up a second installation to help us just measure and monitor changes in the quality of our dark skies here.

Oh, that's right, and Crestone is a Dark Sky designated city, isn't that right?

That's right, we're getting ready to host our fifth annual celebration here on August 30th. It promises to have a good speaker on archaeoastronomy, and fun presentations, and games, and vendors, so if you're in the neighborhood, definitely join us.

And does Dark Sky International have any citizen science projects that you're aware of?

You know, you could say that the attempt to establish the SQM is a form of citizen science. I don't know how formalized it is, but it was. I'll look into that more and see if I can report back maybe next week. It's more advocacy-based than it is research-focused, but I think that research is important to help direct that advocacy.

Right. And there's also, with the rise of smart telescopes, some citizen science projects that are actually being driven by smart telescopes. Not necessarily, like you said, more advocacy than research. There was a project that you and I were involved in where we were doing mega stacks, where we would send our data from our smart telescopes into a central clearinghouse. They would take all the images from all the Seastar telescopes imaging the same object and then basically take all that data and stack it together in thousands and thousands of layers, rather than hundreds of layers that some people do for their processing. So it's basically doing refined astro processing of images, and that was a pretty interesting project as well.

Yeah, and there's a telescope called the Unistellar that has partnered with the SETI Institute, and they have an app that allows people to make specific observations of satellites of solar system objects. So you would take your Unistellar telescope and put it outside and tell the app that you're ready to observe, and it would ask, "What do you need me to look at tonight?" and assist in capturing images for the sake of contributing to the SETI Institute's research projects. They have asteroid occultations, exoplanet discovery, comets, and other events that they are looking for. They post a leaderboard, so you get your "Exoplanet Hunter," your "Top Planetary Guardian," and "Planetary Defense," "Top Comet Watcher," and so forth. I think the gamification of citizen science is a cool feature. It's not just "Am I contributing?" but "How well am I contributing?"

Yeah, that was one of the first things that got me really interested in smart telescopes altogether. I was really super interested in the asteroid occultation project. That's basically taking a look at a star and it just basically waits around until a near-Earth object or asteroid passes in front of that star and causes a slight change in brightness. Having that software on the Unistellar was one of those things, and I'm hoping that they actually come up with that where users of our telescope, like the Seastar, can contribute to that project.

Yes, me too.

And exoplanets are another thing that is similar, that even a small smart telescope can actually detect an exoplanet because of the variance in a star's brightness in a periodic sense. So if you're in a dark sky and you have a smart telescope, you can contribute in looking for exoplanets as well.

Yeah, I love that, even folks who don't live in a dark sky location, or who don't have smart telescopes, can still contribute to citizen science by both running applications to process data and by assisting in the manual processing of data, helping to classify the shapes of galaxies or identify some of these other objects in the solar system that are just waiting to be discovered. Anybody with a computer can assist.

There was one project for looking for water on asteroids, and what they would do is they basically send you a bunch of astrophotos, and you would visually look at those astrophotos and look for objects that had tails like comets. What these actually were, was they were looking for asteroids that had water vapor coming off of them. So they were basically using human eyes, which are apparently better than artificial intelligence, to look for water on asteroids.

It just seems like there are more opportunities than I will ever learn about, much less participate in.

So, yeah, that's a great opportunity for people to get out there, and you can help contribute to science. We'll go ahead and wrap up today's podcast. We thank you all for checking out our podcast, and be sure to comment, like, and subscribe, and let us know what you'd like to hear more about or less about. You can check out our individual websites: Mike's is at WildernessVagabonds.com, and mine is Skylapser.com. If you'd like to help us out financially, you can buy us a cup of coffee at [buymeacoffee.com/skylapser](https://buymeacoffee.com/skylapser). The funds will go to a new all-sky camera for my DS9 observatory. My all-sky camera failed due to moisture intrusion a couple weeks ago, and so I'm hoping to replace that very soon so I can have that all-sky camera up there and capturing images every night that you can see on the DS9 Observatory website at Skylapser.com. Hopefully we can put together a couple cents to replace that camera. The intro music is "Fanfare for Space" by Kevin McLeod from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Sage 9 Observatory, this is Jay Schaefer, and...

Mike Lewinsky.

Wishing you all clear skies.