Welcome to the StarCast for the week of July 20th, 2025. I'm your host, Jay Shaffer, with my co-host, Mike Lewinsky. So let's take a look at space weather.

From SpaceWeather.com. Mike? What's happening with the sun over the next couple days?

Not a lot, Jay. Our chance for geomagnetic storm here in mid-latitudes is… we get about 10% chance of active condition for the next 48 hours, and only a 1% chance of anything better than that, even at high latitudes, they're looking at best, maybe a 20% chance of aurora display. So, I'm not expecting anything this week. And I'd love to be proven wrong.

Well, it seems like we've been kind of spoiled by the whole SolarMax thing from earlier this year, is that the sun has been so active over the last few months that when it calms down to what we would call kind of normal levels, we kind of feel like bereft of activity. But so, Thursday is our new moon, and exactly when that will happen is at 3:11 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. And that's when the new lunar month begins. Unlike the calendar month, which is basically taking the orbit around the Sun and dividing that into 12 slices of pie, the calendar month averages about 30.437 days long. The lunar month, however, from one moon phase to the next, or one new moon to the next new moon, averages at 29.531 days. And that means, on average, you'll see that the Moon is any given phase, about one day earlier each month by the calendar. So, if we go look forward to August, that will be probably that will be on the Wednesday of whatever date that is in August for the new moon. And so, you can kind of figure the moon phases by being kind of like 29 days long, rather than 30 days of the calendar month. For the rest of the week, we'll still be able to see Mars in the evenings to the west, and it sets fairly early. And then, Saturn and Venus are gracing the early morning, pre-dawn sky. We're close to where we're seeing the waning moon, and so that's kind of what's happening this weekend, the night sky, and in space news. Let's look at some headlines. The proposed budget cuts threaten satellite collision prevention program. Proposed budget cuts threaten satellite collision prevention program. A crucial program designed to prevent satellite collisions.

The Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TRACSS, and that's the acronym for that is TRACSS. So that faces elimination under the Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. Established by the first Trump administration and launched as a trial in September 2024, TRACSS provides vital space situational awareness data to civil and commercial satellite operators. Experts warn that defunding the $55 million annual program amidst the rapidly increasing satellite population of nearly 12,000 would be a severe setback for space safety and sustainability. And the big concern here is that with all the additional satellites being put into orbit nowadays, especially by SpaceX, that we were increasing the probability of possible satellite collisions if there's not a central clearinghouse. So, okay.

Thanks, Jay. And in other space news, the biggest black hole merger that has ever been detected is challenging our understanding of cosmology. Cutting-edge gravitational wave detectors have found the most massive black hole merger ever recorded. An international team that discovered it says that its size defies our understanding of how black holes form. This was detected by the LIGO Virga Cagra Collaboration. LIGO is the U.S. Gravitational wave detector. Virgo is European, and CAGRA is a Japanese gravitational wave detector. And their collaboration detected the most massive black hole merger ever observed. The powerful merger produced a final black hole approximately 225 times the mass of our sun. Astronomers detected the signal of the merger designated as GW231123, during the fourth observing run of the LVK network on November 23, 2023. And I'd like to just take a minute and talk a little bit about what gravitational waves are, and how the detectors work, because I think it's a super fascinating topic. A good friend of mine recently visited the LIGO Observatory in Hanford, Washington, and he had a really fun tour. And we had a long conversation about this. So, it was back in 2015 that the first detection of gravitational waves occurred through LIGO. So, gravitational waves are different from most other types of observatories in that they are not electromagnetic radiation. Rather, a gravitational wave is a disturbance in the fabric of space-time itself. And these are believed to occur and were predicted by Albert Einstein, through the merger of black holes. Two black holes, or two neutron stars, collide and form a black hole. This creates a ripple in the very fabric of space-time. And that ripple travels at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second. And the way that we detect them is really quite fascinating. So, LIGO consists of two observatories that are several kilometer-long tunnels. One is in Washington State, one is in Louisiana. And they need to have two in order to rule out disturbances that are caused by terrestrial vibrations. So, with LIGO, we take a laser, and we shoot it to a splitter. The splitter takes that beam of light from the laser and sends it on a perpendicular path down a separate tunnel. And these tunnels are exactly the same distance. Mirrors, at the end of the tunnels reflect that laser back. They are recombined and sent to a detector. And normally, the process of splitting the laser and then recombining it causes what we call destructive interference. So the troughs and the waves, or peaks of the wave, are recombined and they cancel each other out. And the detector does not see light, because there's a perfect cancellation when the two lasers travel the exact same distance. At the speed of light in a vacuum. When a gravitational wave passes along the path through the Earth, that tunnels themselves change in distance, and we're talking a very, very, very tiny change of distance. So, one of the tunnels will grow by approximately 1/1,000th of a width of a proton, and the other tunnel shrinks by approximately 1/1,000th of the width of a proton. So, infinitesimally small. Distances change. But when we're looking at the light from the laser that is recombined, suddenly, the waves and the troughs can no longer cancel each other out. And we receive light on the detector. And when this happens at two different observatories that are 2,000 kilometers apart at the same time, we can infer that, in fact, this is not a terrestrial disturbance localized to one detector, but it is, in fact, a cosmic event. And this event, detected by the LDK network on November 23rd, 2023, combined two black holes that we would not normally see of this size. Black holes come in kind of two classes. You have the very supermassive black holes, such as we see at the center of the Milky Way, which would be the Sagittarius A star black hole, that are tens of thousands to millions of times the mass of our sun. And then you have stellar mass black holes, which are typically much smaller, 10 or 100 times the mass of our sun. And in between these two classes of black holes, we don't see any other evidence of black holes that really range in that mid-range. And so, it does appear that possibly these two black holes that collided had been the product of previous black hole mergers, so. You have black holes that merge into larger black holes, and then merge with still larger black holes. It's… these are also known to be, or believed to be, spinning very, very fast, near the upper limit of what the theory of General relativity suggests is possible. Which also suggests that they're in this class of previously unknown black hole size. And there's still a lot we don't know about this. The distance from the Earth is somewhere between 2 and 13 billion light years, which, at the upper end of that puts it in a very young universe. And one theory is that during the early formation of the universe, different sized black holes were possible. When the first black holes formed, there would have been more accretion disks of gas available to gobble up and grow into larger than normal black hole size. Although there's now some evidence that this process could happen later in the age of the universe. So, just as a reminder that the gravitational waves are traveling at the speed of light, it's possible that this particular detection is of a merger that occurred early in the universe's history.

So, how does that break the laws of the universe as some of the headlines are saying? Is that an exaggeration?

Well, it's really that we did not believe that black holes of this size were possible before, that they would otherwise undergo supernova and not leave the matter available to create a black hole of this size. And so, the detection of a merger of black holes of this size, with a new mass of 225 times the sun, just seems to be outside of the range of what was believed possible, that either you get a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that was part of that formation process. Or you get the stellar mass black holes that are much smaller, and not much in between. And here's something that's sort of in between. And there's… it's possible that this is not a black hole merger at all. They're still open to the possibility that this could be an entirely new phenomenon that was detected that could cause a gravitational wave detection. But, so far, the working theory is that this is the merger of two very large stellar mass black holes, and of course, with a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy where we're not expecting to see those collisions.

Mm-hmm. So, now, they talk about smaller, stellar-sized black holes that could possibly be wandering in interstellar space, and could these gravity wave detectors detect them as, let's say, if there was a kind of a wandering black hole that was approaching our solar system, would these gravity wave detectors be able to detect that, do you think?

Only if it was going to collide with something very large, another black hole. Typically, that's… the gravitational waves are of a small enough magnitude when you do have two very large black holes colliding, that anything, any smaller, eating up a star or a small star, or a planet size mass is probably not going to create a gravitational wave that we would detect.

Okay. So, I know you've got a Dark Sky Festival coming up here soon in Crestone, Colorado. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Mike?

That's right, on August 30th of this year, in Crestone at the Baca campus of the Colorado College will be hosting from noon until probably about 9, 9:30 in the evening, a day-long event to celebrate our Dark Sky designation after 5 years. We do this every summer. The last couple years, we've chosen to do it over the weekend closest to the Perseid meteor shower. We made some adjustments this year, so it's going to be at the end of August over that Labor Day weekend, I believe. So we're gonna have a planetarium display, we will have telescope viewing after dark. We will have a number of speakers, some live music. We're hoping to draw in some food trucks and other vendor booths. I'll be presenting a video display of some of my time-lapse highlights. And we'll have another local amateur astronomer presenting a state of the dark sky using his SQ meters to talk about trends that we are seeing with light pollution in the area. So, and then our keynote speaker is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at Adams State, who will present on archaeo-astronomy topics. I'm super excited about this. Our Crestone Dark Sky chapter has been hosting quarterly star parties. And I think that's going to be kind of our sort of the focus of some of our talk here today. Public astronomy.

Yeah, it's one of those things that, um, people that are interested in astronomy, in kind of the first thing that they do is they go out and buy a low-priced telescope, and then go out and kind of get disappointed, and in the industry, we kind of call that the hobby killer. And, and I've always thought the best way to get people involved in astronomy is get them involved with the community and to do things like a local star party. And so, there's lots of clubs out there, and there's lots of organizations where you can just go out in the evening and meet people, and meet their telescopes, and at these star parties, people are really excited to show you kind of what their telescopes can do, and what's happening in the sky. And so this… that's one way to experience astronomy at low to free cost.

Yeah, there it's really a great time, and there are 33 states with Dark Sky Association chapters, including District of Columbia, so that's, I think, one place to start, the Dark Sky chapters in your state. We'll probably have a calendar of events. And, if there's not events near you, you can always consider planning a vacation trip to a dark sky park, like Mesa Verde or the Great Sand Dunes, which offer Astronomy events to the public and have telescopes for public viewing. And of course, most universities have an observatory and do some astronomy events on a regular basis. So, and I encourage people, if you don't have a dark sky party near you, to start poking around, figure out who has the telescope in your neighborhood, and see if you can create a small event that's how these things get started, is one enthusiast talks to another and discovers that there's an opportunity and a need.

Yeah, and so in Taos here, or northern New Mexico, is we have the El Valle, or I've been told that it's pronounced two different ways, but the word is E-L-V-A-L-L-E, and it's Spanish for the valley. And that's our club, the Elval Astronomy Club. And so we have private star parties where just for club members, and then we also have public outreach parties. And so, for example, we have one coming up here in August that's going to be at the Wild Rivers Recreation area, which is a state park and part of the Bureau of Land Management here in northern New Mexico. And so, at these public star parties, they bring out some of the really big guns, that we've got some 20-inch telescopes that are out there that you can look through, and do visual observation with. And then, the other thing is that, this club is actually an advocate for public telescopes in general, and they have donated a large, 39-inch, I believe it is, mirror telescope to the local university, the University of New Mexico branch here in Taos, New Mexico. And so they've donated this large telescope to the university, and then they've worked with the university in acquiring funds and grants to open a public observatory, so they're going to have a roll-off roof type observatory with this large reflective telescope in it, and that will actually be the largest public telescope available in the southwestern United States, when that is actually implemented, which is we're hoping for that to happen in 2026. And so that's one of the things that our local club is doing. And one of the things that they also kind of do is, if you're looking for bargains in telescopes, is that in our club, we have people that are buying and selling telescopes and actually giving them away. So, like, within the club, we've got… we're giving away a couple, when people get rid of their old telescopes, they say, it's not really worth selling them, we'll just give them away. And so, why go out and buy a telescope if you can join a club, and maybe get somebody's hand-me-down.

Yeah, and Jay, you mentioned a 20-inch telescope. I wanted to also throw out that the Orient Land Trust, which is the parent organization for the Valley View Hot Springs, has a brand new PlaneWave CDK20, state-of-the-art research grade, 20-inch Plane wave telescope. And it's one of only three Plane Wave 20 inch in the state of Colorado, and they're a membership organization, but they do host a public astronomy night. And August 24th is the next Public Astronomy Night at the Valley View Observatories. So, that's just up the road from me here. And, I'm pretty excited to get a chance to look through this new telescope.

Yeah, and I also originally am from Colorado, so I'm familiar with a lot of the observatories that are in Colorado, and so one of the observatories that are in Colorado is the Little Thompson Observatory in Berthoud, Colorado. And this was a large, Smith SCT telescope, one of the largest SCT telescopes in the world, and this was originally a NASA telescope that was used for surveying lunar landing sites. And so, and it's a really interesting telescope, and it is available to the public. So they have public star nights, where you can go to sign up to go to the observatory, and observe through that telescope with a guide that will, basically guide the telescope and say, for example, here we are, we're looking at the Ring Nebula, or something like that. And, you can actually with the telescope for your group. And so, if you have a group of people, in my case, we had our family, our extended family, my nieces and nephews, and brothers and sisters-in-law, and we, as a group, rented that telescope for the evening, and with a guide, and we kind of had a nice family bonding astro experience there, and I'll put the URL for that in the notes, and it's basically starkids.org. And so, there's numerous other observatories within all the states, and you can actually go to a directory or, basically Google, observatories near me, or look for an observatory guide that will tell you what observatories are available in your state? And what the policies are as far as what their public nights are. And so, in Colorado, for example, there was a… there's the DU refractor Telescope and the Observatory Park in kind of central Denver, and not the most unpolluted sky, but it's an interesting instrument, especially for planetary observation. And also, there's the FISC Observatory in Boulder that has public viewing nights, and so, and they're actually have a, I believe it's a weekly viewing night at the Boulder Observatory. Have you had an experience with local observatories there, Mike?

I have not. I think that's something that I need to put on my to-do list here, and go check out, I believe there's one over at Adams State, and I want to see what they have and what they offer.

Yeah. And then, the other thing, of course, our planetariums, and so they're just not for laser shows, while under the influence of hallucinogenics. They're also planetariums that are there for educational purposes and allow you to expand your knowledge of astronomy by going to a planetarium. And, I know you and I have kind of a back burner project of wanting to have a show that would be displayed in a planetarium. And it was… and nowadays, of course, a lot of the planetariums are doing mostly kind of entertainment-type things, what they call full dome shows, but there are planetariums. You can search planetariums near you, and that's always a fun night to go out to kind of look around, and they can kind of guide you through the night sky.

Yeah, that's, I think, just a fantastic way to get involved and meet other people in your area who are interested in, who might be interested in helping you start regular star parties.

Yeah, and then also at these, of course, like you said, for your Dark Sky Festival, is that you have some presenters that are actual scientists and enthusiast with deep knowledge. And, for one, I always like going to the Dark Sky Festival just to see all the fantastic video that you've created.

Thanks, Jay.

Well, so, the bottom line is, kind of go out there and explore your local community, and you hook up with some people, and you can kind of spice up your nightlife with stars. So, 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. And you can also check out our individual websites at wildernessVagabonds.com for Mike, and Skylapser.com, for me. And if you'd like to help us out, you can buy us a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash skylapser. The intro music for our show is Fanfare for Space by Kevin McCloud from the YouTube Audio Library. From the Deep Space Nine Observatory. This is Jay Shaffer, and wishing you all clear skies.