Explore every episode of the podcast Star Trails: From Backyard Astronomy to Cosmic Wonder

The Andromeda Galaxy is not disappearing, exploding or running out of stars. But it may be entering something astronomers recognize as a kind of galactic old age: it is gradually losing the ability to make new ones.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers reconstructed 500 million years of star formation across two-thirds of Andromeda's disk. They found a long decline, followed by an especially steep drop during the past 40 million years. The galaxy's great ring of stellar nurseries is going quiet.

This week on Star Trails, we'll find out how astronomers read the fossil record of 200 million individual stars, why a small satellite galaxy named M32 may be involved and what Andromeda's slowdown could tell us about the future of the Milky Way.

Then, in the Night Sky Report for October 18 through the 24th, we'll look for Andromeda itself, explore the first-quarter Moon, watch for fast Orionid meteors from Halley's Comet and finish the week with the Moon beside Saturn.

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Saturn has a moon with a hidden ocean, and that ocean is spraying samples of itself into space.

Enceladus is only about 310 miles wide, but beneath its brilliant shell of ice lies a global saltwater ocean warmed by the pull of Saturn. Along its south pole, enormous fractures release water vapor and tiny frozen grains. NASA's Cassini spacecraft flew through that spray and found salts, organic compounds, molecular hydrogen, silica and phosphorus: an intriguing collection of water, chemistry and energy.

Now two new studies make the story even more compelling. One suggests that Enceladus naturally separates and concentrates its ocean chemistry into individual ice grains, potentially making signs of life easier for a future spacecraft to detect. The other shows that a methane-producing microorganism from Earth can survive under a laboratory recreation of Enceladus-like conditions.

This week on Star Trails, we'll visit the little moon that may be preparing its own samples for us. Then, after the break, we'll discover why the average color of the universe is called Cosmic Latte before heading outside for Mars in the Beehive Cluster, a young Moon beside Antares, Vesta at opposition and a perfectly timed fade of the Demon Star.

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A black hole in our galaxy appears to be aiming a relativistic jet almost directly toward Earth. That sounds like a reasonably good opening line for October.

The object, IRAS 18293−0941, is a binary system about 12,000 light-years away. A stellar-mass black hole is feeding on material from a massive companion star and launching jets at no less than roughly two-thirds the speed of light. Because one jet is directed close to our line of sight, astronomers believe they may have found the Milky Way's first convincing microblazar—a miniature version of the blazars powered by supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.

This week on Star Trails, we'll look down the barrel of that cosmic engine, learn why the jet is far more interesting than frightening, and follow the other jet as it crashes into a molecular cloud and may accelerate particles to extraordinary energies.

Then in the Night Sky Report for October 4 through the 10th, Saturn reaches opposition, the waning Moon visits Mars and the Beehive Cluster, and much of North America gets to watch the Moon make Jupiter disappear. We'll also look for a dragon's handful of meteors under nearly moonless skies before the new Moon arrives on Saturday.

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What if Venus once had a moon, and then destroyed it?

A new study suggests that under plausible conditions, an ancient Venusian moon could have slowly migrated inward, crossed the Roche limit and ultimately been torn apart or swallowed by the planet. And Venus may not be the only hungry object in our cosmic neighborhood: another recent study explores whether the young Sun could have consumed a super-Earth, leaving subtle chemical and structural fingerprints behind billions of years later.

This week on Star Trails, we're following a cosmic version of the old nursery rhyme "There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly." Planets can swallow moons. Stars can swallow planets. Galaxies devour other galaxies. Along the way, we'll explore why orbits aren't permanent, why Earth's Moon is slowly escaping us while Mars's Phobos is falling inward, and how gravity can transform apparently stable systems over astronomical timescales.

Then in the Night Sky Report for September 27 through October 3, autumn has officially arrived. We'll look for Saturn near opposition, a Moon-and-Pleiades pairing, Jupiter and its Galilean moons, and the changing fall sky. We'll also visit a newly discovered crater on the Moon and check in on the fast-moving mystery of Webb's strange Little Red Dots.

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What if the first evidence of an advanced alien civilization isn’t a message, but a star whose energy books don’t quite balance?

This week, we explore the strange history and surprisingly real science of Dyson spheres, from Olaf Stapledon and Freeman Dyson to the unforgettable Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics.” We’ll learn why a vast swarm of orbiting collectors makes more sense than a solid shell, and how astronomers search for the missing starlight and excess infrared heat such a civilization might produce.

We also examine Project Hephaistos and its search through millions of nearby stars, the James Webb observations that unmasked two promising candidates, and a recent proposal suggesting that hyper-efficient alien computers could create a much colder, and harder to find, form of waste heat.

Then, in the night sky report, the Moon visits brilliant Venus, Antares and the Teapot of Sagittarius. Venus reaches peak brightness, Saturn rules the evening sky, and International Observe the Moon Night gives everyone a reason to spend Saturday evening looking up.

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Galaxies carry the evidence of their past. When the Milky Way captures a dwarf galaxy or tears apart a globular cluster, it leaves behind long, ghostly ribbons of stars called stellar streams. These streams preserve the history of ancient collisions, and their shapes may trace the invisible dark matter surrounding a galaxy.

This week, we follow the stellar wreckage left behind by galactic cannibalism, from the enormous Sagittarius stream wrapped around the Milky Way to Oyashio, the first suspected globular-cluster stream discovered beyond our galaxy. We’ll explore how astronomers use these delicate structures as cosmic windsocks and seismographs, and why gaps or kinks in a stream might reveal an encounter with something made almost entirely of dark matter.

We’ll also look at how the newly launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could transform this work by finding stellar streams around hundreds of other galaxies. Then, in this week’s night sky report, the Moon visits Mars and Jupiter, the September Epsilon Perseids arrive under nearly moonless skies, and Saturn returns as a prime telescopic target.

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The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered hundreds of tiny red points in the early universe. They are extraordinarily compact, unexpectedly bright and strangely quiet in the X-ray and radio wavelengths where an active black hole should reveal itself.

Astronomers call them “little red dots,” but that modest nickname conceals one of the most intriguing mysteries of the Webb era.

In this episode, we follow the clues hidden in their light. Some may contain young black holes buried inside enormous cocoons of hydrogen, objects researchers have nicknamed “black hole stars.” Others may be powered by supermassive stars, furious bursts of star formation or combinations of several different cosmic engines.

We’ll examine new evidence from several unusual objects, visit the nearby Saguaro galaxy and the curious galaxies known as Green Peas, and ask whether the young Milky Way might once have appeared as a little red dot of its own.

Then, in the Night Sky Report for August 30 through September 6, we’ll look for the Moon beside Saturn, Venus near Spica, Mars and Jupiter before dawn, and some of the quieter constellations hiding around the Summer Triangle.

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The Milky Way looks permanent from our place inside it, a great band of stars stretching across the night sky. But new research suggests our galaxy may once have been oriented in a completely different direction, perhaps reorienting by more than 90 degrees during its violent youth.

This episode explores the evidence for the Milky Way's possible ancient flip and, even more remarkably, how astronomers could possibly reconstruct something that happened around ten billion years ago. Using stellar motions measured by Gaia, the debris of the ancient Gaia-Enceladus merger, cosmological simulations, and even the inferred shape of the Milky Way's invisible dark-matter halo, astronomers are learning to read our galaxy's history from the fossils it left behind.

We also follow up on the August 5 rocket-body impact on the Moon, and discover why an event involving four tons of hardware traveling thousands of miles per hour was still almost impossibly tiny from Earth.

Then we head outside for the August 16–29 night sky. Venus meets the crescent Moon, Saturn continues its return to the evening sky, Mars and Jupiter appear before dawn, and the first autumn constellations begin climbing into view. We'll use Pegasus and Cassiopeia to find the Andromeda Galaxy and watch for lingering Perseids and Kappa Cygnid fireballs.

And circle August 27–28 on the calendar: the Full Sturgeon Moon will pass almost completely into Earth's shadow during a deep partial lunar eclipse, with roughly 96 percent of the lunar disk immersed in the umbra at maximum.

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What happens when a black hole spins? According to general relativity, it doesn't simply rotate in space, it actually drags spacetime around with it.

This episode explores the strange phenomenon known as frame dragging, from its first predictions more than a century ago to new observations that may let astronomers watch it at work around supermassive black holes. We'll visit a distant black hole where the remains of a shredded star appear to be wobbling through twisted spacetime, then return to the center of our own Milky Way to meet S301, a star racing around Sagittarius A* at more than eight percent of the speed of light. Its extreme orbit may eventually help astronomers measure the spin of our galaxy's central black hole.

And there's plenty happening closer to home. A spent Falcon 9 rocket stage is expected to crash into the Moon on August 5, Comet 10P/Tempel is making a favorable pass through the inner Solar System, and the Perseid meteor shower arrives under nearly perfect dark-sky conditions thanks to the New Moon.

We'll also look at Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter in the August sky, plus the total solar eclipse of August 12.

Finally, we look back fifty years to Viking 1 and the extraordinary moment when Mars stopped being merely a world seen from afar and became a place with rocks, dirt, sky, and a horizon.

It's a packed couple of weeks beneath the stars.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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Most amateur astronomers spend their nights collecting light. But what if you could study our galaxy without looking through a telescope at all?

In this episode, we sit down with amateur astronomer and radio enthusiast Hap Griffin to explore the fascinating world of backyard radio astronomy. Using a homemade radio telescope consisting of a recycled microwave dish, and less than $100 worth of electronics, Hap is recreating one of the classic experiments that revealed the Milky Way's spiral structure.

Along the way, you'll learn how astronomers use the natural radio emission from hydrogen gas to map our galaxy, why radio astronomy works day or night, and why this remarkable corner of the hobby is far more accessible than most people realize.

Later in the episode, we'll head outside for a look at the night sky from July 19 through August 1, including the Full Buck Moon, Saturn's return to the late evening sky, the Double-Double in Lyra, M13, the Lagoon Nebula, and two summer meteor showers.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• RTL-SDR (Amazon.com)
• Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) for 21 cm use (Amazon.com)
• SDR# (SDRSharp) software
• Parabolic antenna for hydrogen line applications (Amazon.com)
• Hap's presentation on radio astronomy (PDF)

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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What if the mysterious "Planet Nine" isn't a planet at all?

In this episode, we journey to the distant frontier of our Solar System to explore one of astronomy's strangest modern hypotheses: the possibility that the unseen object influencing the orbits of distant icy worlds could actually be a primordial black hole, an ancient relic formed in the first moments after the Big Bang.

Along the way, we'll revisit the discovery of Neptune, learn how astronomers detect objects they can't even see, and discover why gravity often reveals secrets long before telescopes do. We'll also look at the real observatories and sky surveys that may one day solve the mystery once and for all.

Then we'll head outside for your complete night sky guide for July 5-18, 2026, featuring the upcoming New Moon, Saturn in the morning sky, a beautiful crescent Moon meeting Venus, prime Milky Way observing, deep-sky targets including M13 and the Ring Nebula, and the first hints of summer meteor activity.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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For generations, we've pictured the Solar System as a stable and orderly place: planets forming where they are today and quietly orbiting the Sun for billions of years. But what if that picture is wrong?

In this episode, we explore the Grand Tack Hypothesis, a fascinating idea suggesting that Jupiter may have migrated deep into the young Solar System before reversing course and heading back outward. Along the way, the giant planet may have reshaped the asteroid belt, influenced the formation of Mars, and helped determine whether Earth as we know it could exist at all.

We'll also take a closer look at Jupiter's complicated reputation as both protector and troublemaker. Does the Solar System's largest planet shield Earth from dangerous impacts, or does it sometimes send trouble our way?

Later, we'll celebrate the arrival of summer with a look at the summer solstice and explore what's happening in this week's night sky, including the Moon, the bright evening planets, the Summer Triangle, and the first great views of the summer Milky Way.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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Summer is almost here, and with it comes one of the richest observing seasons of the year.

In this episode, we take a road trip through the summer sky, exploring the constellations, deep-sky objects, planets, meteor showers, and celestial events that will define the next three months of stargazing. Along the way we'll visit the Summer Triangle, cruise through the star clouds of the Milky Way, stop at famous landmarks like the Great Hercules Cluster and the Lagoon Nebula, and look ahead to the Perseid meteor shower and a deep partial lunar eclipse later this summer.

Summer astronomy has its own character. The nights are warm, the Milky Way is bright, and some of the best observing experiences come not from reaching a destination, but from wandering beneath the stars and discovering something unexpected along the way.

In this episode:

• The Summer Triangle and why it signals the arrival of summer
• Exploring the Milky Way with binoculars
• The Great Rift and the crowded heart of our galaxy
• M13, the Lagoon Nebula, the Trifid Nebula, the Ring Nebula, and other summer favorites
• The myths and stories behind Scorpius, Sagittarius, Cygnus, and Hercules
• Venus, Saturn, and notable summer conjunctions
• The Southern Delta Aquariids and Perseid meteor showers
• August's deep partial lunar eclipse

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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Back in November of 2024, I attended a star party hosted by the Midlands Astronomy Club and recorded what became one of my favorite episodes of Star Trails. This week, while taking a short break to recharge and prepare future episodes, I thought it would be the perfect time to revisit that night under the stars.

In this remastered archive presentation, we’ll head out to a dark-sky observing site where amateur astronomers gather with telescopes, guitars, stories, and a shared fascination with the cosmos. Along the way, you’ll hear conversations with longtime stargazers, club members, and curious newcomers as we explore what makes star parties so special — and why astronomy is often just as much about community as it is the night sky itself.

You’ll hear stories about first telescopes, vintage gear, cloudy-night camaraderie, public outreach, and the unforgettable experience of seeing Saturn or the Moon through a telescope for the very first time. Even when the weather refuses to cooperate, the sense of wonder remains.

This episode features newly recorded narration and updated audio production, but otherwise remains preserved as originally released in 2024. Whether you’re hearing it for the first time or revisiting it alongside me, I hope it reminds you why we gather beneath the stars in the first place.

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This week we conclude our month-long journey through galaxies by exploring one of the biggest questions in astronomy: how galaxies are born, evolve, and eventually die.

We begin in the aftermath of the Big Bang, tracing how tiny fluctuations in matter slowly grew into the first galaxies. Along the way, we explore starburst galaxies, galactic recycling, and the remarkable realization that the elements making up planets, oceans, and even human beings were forged inside ancient generations of stars.

Then we dive into one of the universe’s greatest mysteries: supermassive black holes. Why do most galaxies appear to contain them? Where did these enormous black holes come from? And did galaxies create black holes, or did black holes help create galaxies? We’ll also explore active galactic nuclei, quasars, and the astonishing discovery that some black holes may have formed far earlier than astronomers once believed possible.

Finally, we examine the groundbreaking discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope and the ancient galaxies it has revealed, galaxies appearing surprisingly massive and chemically evolved only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. We close by looking toward the distant future, where galaxies fade into quiet “red and dead” remnants, and where strange objects like jellyfish galaxies reveal that even galaxies themselves can slowly suffocate and die.

Plus:

• This week’s night sky for May 24–30, 2026
• The mythology and zodiac lore of Leo
• A look at the Blue Moon arriving on May 31st
• Planet visibility for Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn
• And a deep sky visit to Messier 87 — the galaxy whose supermassive black hole became the first ever directly imaged by humanity.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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This week we continue our month-long journey through the world of galaxies, but this time, we venture into one of astronomy’s darkest frontiers. Beyond the glowing spirals and brilliant star clouds lies a universe filled with hidden structures, invisible matter, and mysteries that continue to challenge modern science.

We venture into the Zone of Avoidance, a cosmic blind spot created by the dust and stars of our own Milky Way, and ask whether entire galaxies may still be hiding just beyond our view. From ghostly ultra-diffuse galaxies like Dragonfly 44, to the invisible gravitational scaffolding of dark matter, we’ll follow the clues that reveal a universe far stranger than it first appears.

Along the way, we’ll look at the mind-bending beauty of gravitational lensing, the mysterious pull of the Great Attractor, and the breathtaking scale of the cosmic web, an immense network of filaments, nodes, and voids that connects galaxies across billions of light-years.

Later in the show, we step back outside for your weekly night sky report, featuring dark skies after the new moon, evening views of Venus and Jupiter, pre-dawn glimpses of Saturn and Mars, early Milky Way core season, and a few lesser-known galaxy targets hiding in Canes Venatici.

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This week we continue our month-long journey through the world of galaxies, but this time, we move beyond what galaxies are and explore what galaxies actually do. It turns out these vast islands of stars are anything but static. They collide, merge, exchange gas and dust, fling stars into deep space, and sometimes grow by consuming smaller neighbors in a process astronomers call galactic cannibalism.

We begin close to home with the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, a hidden companion galaxy currently being torn apart by the gravity of our own Milky Way. From there, we travel some 70 million light-years away to the spectacular Antennae Galaxies, where two spiral galaxies are locked in a slow-motion collision that is both destructive, and strangely creative.

Along the way, we recall my recent conversation with astrophysicist Enrique López Rodríguez to explore the possibility of magnetic bridges and “superhighways” carrying gas, dust, and charged particles between galaxies, raising the astonishing possibility that the raw ingredients of future planets may sometimes originate far beyond their home galaxy.

And finally, we return to the question we teased last week: What about us? Is the long-predicted collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy still inevitable? New observations from Hubble Space Telescope and Gaia suggest the answer may be far less certain than we once believed.

We'll also check in with this week's night sky, and wrap up our discussion of NightWatch.

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This week, we begin a new month-long journey into one of the most awe-inspiring subjects in astronomy: Galaxies.

We start close to home by exploring our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and asking a deceptively simple question: where does a galaxy actually end? Along the way, we’ll explore spiral arms, dark matter, supermassive black holes, the hidden structure of our galactic halo, and the faint ghostly glow of Integrated Flux Nebula, dust clouds illuminated by the combined light of billions of stars.

We’ll also discover why our solar system doesn’t align with the Milky Way the way you might expect, how astronomers mapped our galaxy from the inside using radio waves, and what the night sky might look like if the Milky Way simply vanished.

Later in the episode: I report on a backyard observation of Amazon’s recent Leo satellite launch, plus, this week’s night sky highlights, the Eta Aquariid meteor shower, Jupiter and Saturn, and a trio of deep-sky galaxies perfect for spring observing.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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In this episode we step behind the scenes of modern astronomy to explore a side of the universe you can’t see, at least not directly.

We sit down with Professor Enrique López Rodríguez, an extragalactic astronomer at the University of South Carolina and one of the leading researchers in the United States studying magnetic fields in galaxies.

The conversation also dives into the complex behavior of supermassive black holes, some actively feeding and driving powerful outflows, others surprisingly quiet, and how these cosmic engines influence the evolution of entire galaxies.

Along the way, we’ll look at how modern astronomy is mapping the hidden forces that connect the universe.

And later in the show, we return to something a little closer to home with this week’s night sky, featuring the rising Flower Moon, bright evening planets, and a deep-sky tour through one of the richest regions of galaxies visible from Earth.

Links mentioned:

• Enrique Lopez Rodriguez online
• Survey of Extragalactic Magnetism with SOFIA

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In this episode, we explore the role of computers in astronomy. From the ancient Antikythera Mechanism and the human “computers” of the Harvard College Observatory, to the rise of electronic machines, supercomputers like the Cray-2, and modern programming languages like Fortran and Python, we trace the evolution of how we’ve learned to model and understand the universe.

Along the way, we dive into concepts like data reduction, radio interferometry, distributed computing with SETI@home, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in making new discoveries. We also take a hands-on detour, compiling a simple N-body simulation in Fortran and visualizing the results with Python—bringing a tiny gravitational universe to life.

Later in the show, we step outside for this week’s night sky, featuring a delicate crescent Moon with Earthshine, the Lyrid meteor shower, a beautiful pairing of Venus and the Moon, and a selection of deep sky targets for patient observers.

Links mentioned:

• My N-Body Fortran simulation
• Using AI to identify objects from Hubble data

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In this episode, we move beyond what the eye can see and into a universe that has been quietly speaking all along.

Radio astronomy has transformed our understanding of the cosmos, not by capturing images, but by detecting faint signals that have traveled across space for billions of years. From the accidental discovery of radio waves from the Milky Way by Karl Jansky, to the detection of the afterglow of the Big Bang, this field has revealed a hidden layer of reality that optical astronomy alone could never uncover.

We’ll explore how radio telescopes actually work, from signal capture and amplification to digitization and frequency analysis using the Fast Fourier Transform. Along the way, we’ll break down concepts like interferometry, beamforming, and deconvolution—techniques that allow astronomers to reconstruct images from incomplete data and even map the structure of our own galaxy using hydrogen emissions.

We’ll also take a look at one of the most remarkable achievements in modern astronomy: the first image of a black hole, created by the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of observatories that effectively turned Earth itself into a single telescope.

And we’ll connect these advanced techniques back to everyday life. The same math and signal processing used to study the universe are also at work in your phone, your Wi-Fi router, and your headphones.

Later in the show, we reflect on a striking new image from the Artemis II mission, and step outside for a look at this week’s night sky, featuring dark skies, distant galaxies, and a subtle planetary alignment for early risers.

Links mentioned:

• Artemis II Wake-Up playlist on Spotify
• "Hello World" image from Artemis II

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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What makes a song feel like space? In this special bonus episode of Star Trails, we take a deep dive into the song "Space Oddity," not just as a piece of music, but as a story of distance, disconnection, and drift.

Released in 1969 at the height of the space race, Bowie’s breakout hit arrived alongside humanity’s first steps on the Moon. The BBC even used it during their coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, a strange pairing for a song about an astronaut who never makes it home.

But the real story of Space Oddity goes deeper. Through subtle harmonic shifts, borrowed chords, and unconventional production techniques, the song itself begins to drift, mirroring the fate of its protagonist, Major Tom.

We’ll explore: How the song quietly abandons its musical “home,” why instruments like the Mellotron and Stylophone create a sense of distance, the role of stereo mixing, reverb, and tape-era studio tricks in shaping its sound, and how Bowie’s use of characters allows the story to resonate on a deeper level.

Along the way, we trace the song’s journey beyond Earth itself, including Chris Hadfield’s performance aboard the International Space Station.

More than 50 years after its release, Space Oddity remains a haunting reflection on what it means to leave home, and what happens when you don’t come back.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week we step inside one of astronomy’s most iconic spaces: the observatory.

Drew visits Melton Memorial Observatory and sits down with director Martin Bowers to explore what a nearly 100-year-old, urban observatory still offers today. From public viewing nights to hands-on learning, we look at how these classic domes continue to connect people with the night sky, even under city lights.

Then, we zoom out to the bigger picture.

From Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory to Mauna Kea Observatories and Paranal Observatory, we trace how observatories evolved from simple telescopes into powerful instruments that reshaped our understanding of the universe.

All of it built on a simple idea: gathering light, photon by photon.

Plus, a quick look at what’s in the night sky for the week of April 5th.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Melton Memorial Observatory Website
• Melton Facebook Page

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week we leave the familiar planets behind and venture into the farthest reaches of our Solar System, into regions where the Sun’s influence begins to fade and the boundaries of our cosmic neighborhood grow uncertain.

We explore the Kuiper Belt, a vast disk of icy remnants left over from the formation of the planets, and travel even farther into the mysterious Oort Cloud, a distant, spherical halo of objects that may extend halfway to the nearest stars. Along the way, we uncover the discoveries that reshaped our understanding of the Solar System, from the first detection of Kuiper Belt objects to the controversial reclassification of Pluto after the discovery of Eris.

We also follow the journey of the Voyager spacecraft, now drifting through interstellar space yet still deep within the Sun’s extended domain, and examine the ongoing search for the elusive Planet Nine, a world that may exist only as a gravitational whisper in the darkness.

And then there are the visitors: interstellar objects like ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov, fragments from other star systems passing briefly through our own.

In this week’s night sky report, we look ahead to the April 1 Full Moon, known as the Pink Moon, and highlight what you can still observe under bright moonlight, including Jupiter, several star clusters, and a beautiful close pairing of the Moon and Regulus.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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The most intriguing places in our solar system might not be planets at all. This week we turn our attention to some of the most fascinating and unusual worlds in our solar system: its moons.

For most of human history, we assumed moons were quiet, lifeless companions like our own. But as spacecraft ventured deeper into the outer solar system, a very different picture emerged.

Some moons erupt with volcanoes. Some hide vast oceans beneath miles of ice. Some have weather, rivers, and lakes, made not of water, but methane. And a few of them may have the ingredients necessary for life.

We’ll explore these strange worlds, from Io and Europa to Titan and Enceladus, and take a closer look at what makes them so dynamic. Along the way, we’ll revisit Pluto and its surprisingly complex family of moons, and consider why the outer solar system is teeming with these objects while the inner planets remain mostly bare.

Finally, we’ll step outside for a guided tour of the night sky for the week of March 22–28, including a waxing crescent Moon, brilliant Venus in the evening sky, Jupiter and its Galilean moons, and the arrival of spring’s galaxy season. We'll also check in on our book discussion with a look at Chapters 8 and 9 in Nightwatch.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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In 2006, a group of astronomers gathered in Prague and made a decision that shocked the world: Pluto was no longer a planet.

But the story of Pluto is far more complicated—and far more fascinating—than that single vote.

In this episode of Star Trails, we reopen the case. From Percival Lowell’s search for the mysterious “Planet X” to Clyde Tombaugh’s painstaking discovery using a blink comparator, we trace the strange history of the ninth planet. We’ll examine the discoveries that led to Pluto’s controversial demotion, meet the astronomers who helped redefine what a planet is, and follow NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it revealed Pluto to be a dynamic and surprisingly complex world.

Along the way we explore Pluto’s bizarre orbit, its giant moon Charon, its icy surface and hidden mysteries—and the poetic moment when the ashes of its discoverer finally returned to the distant world he found.

And later in the show, we step outside for a look at the night sky for the week of March 15–21, including dark skies near the new moon, the arrival of the vernal equinox, brilliant Jupiter in Gemini, and a few deep-sky treasures worth tracking down with your telescope.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week we leave the rocky inner planets behind and journey into the deep cold of the outer solar system. From the storm-wracked atmosphere of Jupiter to the ringed elegance of Saturn and the mysterious ice giants Uranus and Neptune, these distant worlds reveal how strange and varied our planetary neighborhood truly is.

Along the way we explore how the solar system formed, why the inner planets are rocky while the outer planets became giants of gas and ice, and why the distant ice giants remain some of the least explored worlds we know.

Later in the episode we share a personal observing report after attempting to spot a SpaceX rocket launch from hundreds of miles away, offer up tips on how you might see one yourself, and we'll walk through what’s visible in the night sky for the week of March 8–14.

We’ll also continue our NightWatch book club with Chapters 6 and 7, exploring the realities of visual astronomy and how patient observation reveals the subtle beauty of the deep sky.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Spaceflight Now website

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In this milestone 100th episode of Star Trails, we bring the cosmos back home.

After months of exploring distant stars, nebulae, and black holes, March begins with a tour of our own neighborhood: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, four rocky worlds born from the same protoplanetary disk 4.5 billion years ago, yet shaped into radically different outcomes.

We’ll visit Mercury, the tiny planet that helped confirm Einstein’s General Relativity and inspired the hunt for a phantom world called Vulcan. We’ll step into Venus, Earth’s “twin” turned runaway greenhouse furnace, and then we’ll zoom out on Earth itself as if we’re alien astronomers reading its oceans, oxygen, and technosignatures from afar. Finally, we’ll head to Mars, a planet that once hosted flowing water, may have been habitable long ago, and still tempts us with the unresolved question of past life.

After the break, I nerd out about my electric car and trace an unexpected history of EVs in space, from the lunar rovers parked on the Moon to a Tesla Roadster orbiting the Sun.

In the sky report, the week’s headline event is a total lunar eclipse: the Full Worm Moon turns coppery red in Earth’s shadow, the only total lunar eclipse of 2026 visible across much of North America. Plus: Jupiter shines in the evening sky, and Mercury and Venus linger low in twilight.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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In this episode, we wrap up our month-long series on stars by exploring their final acts.

Most stars don’t explode. They grow old. We’ll follow the Sun’s future as it swells into a red giant, sheds its outer layers, and becomes a dense white dwarf held up not by heat, but by quantum mechanics itself. Along the way, we’ll examine planetary nebulae like the Ring Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula, and look at real red giants such as Betelgeuse and Aldebaran that foreshadow stellar endings.

Then we turn to the massive stars — the ones that collapse, detonate as supernovae, leave behind neutron stars and magnetars, or cross the final threshold into black holes. We’ll discuss how gravity overwhelms every known force, how black holes are categorized by size, and why even these seemingly eternal objects slowly evaporate over unimaginable timescales.

In the night sky report, we cover the waxing Moon, a six-planet evening “parade,” Jupiter shining high after sunset, and a beautiful lunar encounter with the Pleiades.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week we take a nerdy detour into the lives of stars by building a tiny simulated galaxy in Python. We form half a million stars, roll the clock forward 10 billion years, and discover something counterintuitive: nearly all of them are still shining. The stars that dominate our constellations, the bright, showy ones, are statistically the least likely to survive. The night sky, it turns out, is a biased sample.

From there, we leave the realm of statistics and tour a handful of “highlight reel” stars: neighbors like Proxima Centauri and Barnard’s Star, navigational royalty like Canopus, famous oddballs like Vega, and cosmic heavyweights like Antares and WR 104, the so-called “Death Star” that’s (probably) not aimed at us after all.

This week's night sky lands in the sweet spot of the month: A New Moon on February 17 brings genuinely dark evenings, followed by a delicate crescent return. Watch the young Moon pass Saturn on February 19, with Mercury about five degrees south.

Finally, in our book club, we continue with Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson, covering Chapters 4 and 5. We talk old-school printed star charts, seasonal sky “guideposts,” why the Milky Way is a river of unresolved starlight, and Dickinson’s legendary warning about “Christmas trash scopes.”

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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Stars are easy to take for granted. They rise, they set, and they seem unchanged from one night to the next. But in this episode of Star Trails, we shift our focus to what stars are actually doing right now, shaping nebulae, building solar systems, regulating star formation, and quietly organizing the structure of galaxies around them.

We explore stellar nurseries like the Orion and Eagle Nebulae, where young stars actively sculpt their birth clouds, and look at star clusters, both open and globular, as living communities that reveal how mass determines a star’s fate. Along the way, we unpack one of the strangest facts in astronomy: that the smallest, coolest stars may live for trillions of years, far longer than the universe has existed so far, and how we know that’s true.

Later in the show, we step outside and survey the night sky for February 8–14, demystifying the so-called “planetary parade” by using it as a guide to the ecliptic — the shared path planets follow across the sky.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week, we begin a month-long exploration of the most familiar objects in the night sky, and wonder why they’re still so often misunderstood.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into what a star really is, and just as importantly, what it isn’t. We’ll talk about how stars form, why they live such turbulent lives, how light escapes their interiors over immense spans of time, and why the stars we see from Earth are not representative of the galaxy as a whole.

Along the way, we’ll challenge common assumptions about color, brightness, and magnitude, explore the strange world of brown dwarves and “failed” stars, and reflect on why nearly everything around us exists because earlier generations of stars lived and died long before the Sun was born.

After the break, we turn our attention to the night sky for February 1st through the 7th. The week opens under the light of the full Snow Moon. We’ll talk about a close lunar encounter with Regulus in Leo, and a selection of star clusters and overlooked regions that still shine through imperfect conditions, including the Beehive Cluster, M67, Monoceros, and a charming little cluster in Orion known as “the 37.”

We also kick off the Star Trails book club with the first three chapters of NightWatch by Terence Dickinson. We’ll discuss why this classic guide remains so valuable, how different editions compare, and why books are still some of the best companions you can bring to the night sky.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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What if the problem isn’t the sky, but our expectations?

In this episode we step back from targets, charts, and techniques to talk about something every stargazer eventually encounters: the myth of the perfect night. Clear horizons, steady seeing, and flawless gear. Astronomy culture often presents these moments as normal, when in reality they’re exceptions. Most nights are compromised, interrupted, or quietly frustrating. It’s the nature of the hobby.

We explore how social media and memory itself smooth over disappointment, how unmet expectations can drain motivation, and why so many astronomers quietly drift away without realizing nothing is actually “wrong.” From dew-soaked star parties and missed comets to long stretches of waiting and adjusting, this episode hopes to show those imperfect nights still matter.

If you’ve ever packed up early, felt discouraged, or wondered whether the struggle was worth it, this one’s for you.

In the second half of the show, we'll turn our attention back to this week's night sky, and check in on recent solar activity that lit up the skies with auroras last week. If you caught the aurora, or tried to and came up empty, I’d love to hear your story. Photos, sightings, and near-misses are all welcome at the show website.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In this episode, we continue our January series for new stargazers by exploring one of the most quietly mind-bending truths in astronomy: everything is moving, including you. Even when you’re standing motionless in your backyard, you’re traveling through space at extraordinary speed, carried along by Earth’s rotation, its orbit around the Sun, the Sun’s journey through the Milky Way, and the motion of the galaxy itself.

From that realization, we peel back the layers of motion that shape the night sky. We explore why stars rise and set, why the Moon never shows us its far side, how planets appear to reverse course in retrograde motion, and why familiar constellations are only temporary arrangements. Along the way, we talk about tidal locking, libration, axial precession, stellar proper motion, and even the subtle wobble of the Sun itself around the solar system’s barycenter.

In the second half of the show, we turn our attention to the backyard with this week’s night sky report, featuring dark, Moon-free skies, brilliant Jupiter, Saturn in the southwest, a close Moon–Saturn–Neptune pairing, and excellent conditions for deep-sky favorites like the Beehive Cluster.

We also officially kick off the Star Trails Book Club, beginning with NightWatch by Terence Dickinson, one of the most beloved guides to the night sky ever written.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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This week we slow down and spend the night with one of the sky’s most iconic constellations: Orion. We'll use the mighty hunter as a guide, learning how his stars can point the way to other landmarks in the winter sky, from blazing Sirius to Aldebaran and the Pleiades.

Along the way, we explore Orion’s rich mythology, his role in ancient cultures, and the remarkable deep-sky objects hidden within his outline, including stellar nurseries, dark nebulae, and the vast structures shaping this region of the Milky Way.

We also journey back thousands of years to ancient Egypt to examine the intriguing and controversial Orion Correlation Theory, which suggests a connection between the cosmos and the pyramids of Giza. What does the evidence really say, and why does Orion continue to draw humans into stories that link sky and stone?

To round out the episode, we’ll check in on the night sky for January 11–17, including the Moon’s phase, visible planets, and observing highlights, plus a look at recent space news featuring the discovery of a mysterious “failed galaxy” known as Cloud-9.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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The first episode of a new year is a good time to slow down, zoom out, and reset. In this episode, we welcome new and returning listeners alike for a thoughtful reintroduction to stargazing, one that sets aside checklists, gear anxiety, and the pressure to “do it right,” and instead focuses on patience, curiosity, and learning the sky where you are.

Along the way, the episode explores the idea of the sky as a clock, the power of naked-eye and binocular observing, and the winter night sky anchored by Orion, Jupiter, and the Great Nebula.

It also branches into a backyard stargazer’s reading recommendation (Nightwatch by Terence Dickinson) and a fascinating moment from astronomy’s past, the long search for the nonexistent planet Vulcan, and how Einstein’s theory of general relativity finally explained Mercury’s strange orbit. This episode sets the tone for the year ahead: astronomy as a practice, not a performance.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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As the year winds down, we make one last stop beneath the night sky for the week of December 21–27, marking the arrival of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year and a quiet turning point in Earth’s journey around the Sun.

In this short holiday episode, we reflect on what the solstice means from an astronomical perspective, why ancient cultures saw it as a rebirth of light, and how it gifts modern stargazers with long, early nights and some of the most iconic sights in the sky.

We tour the familiar winter constellations as Orion rises into prominence, with the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, Sirius, and the steady guideposts of the northern sky all on display. This week also features some of winter’s planetary beacons, with Jupiter blazing brightly, Saturn lingering quietly in the early evening, and Mercury making a brief predawn appearance for sharp-eyed observers.

The episode also includes a spoiler-free book recommendation for listeners who enjoyed November’s deeper dives into time dilation, interstellar travel, and the limits imposed by physics. Drew shares thoughts on Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, author of The Martian.

Finally, as a holiday gift to listeners, we introduce Liminal Horizon, a new music project featuring three albums of space-inspired, planetarium-style music designed for stargazing, night drives, and quiet contemplation.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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For the season finale of Star Trails, we’re building a “time machine” the only way we know how: with physics, not plot holes. Drew takes a tour through the time-travel stories that shaped his 80s childhood—Back to the Future, Star Trek IV, The Time Machine, Bill & Ted, and even Disney’s wonderfully unhinged The Black Hole—and then sets them beside the actual rules of our universe. We’ll look at the real ways you can travel into the future using speed and gravity.

Along the way we’ll ride with nuclear-pulse starships, bust the myth of the Bussard ramjet, and imagine skimming just outside the maw of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. We’ll talk about why time only runs forward, what it really means to “move through spacetime,” why black holes make clocks crawl, and how modern quantum ideas try, and mostly fail, to sneak backward time travel in through the side door without breaking causality.

In the second half of the episode, we park the starship and focus on the actual sky. December is one of the richest observing months of the year, so while the podcast takes a short holiday break, you’ll have a clear roadmap: the final Cold Supermoon of the year, the Geminid and Ursid meteor showers, Mercury’s dawn cameo, Jupiter and Saturn in the evening, and the full cast of winter constellations. We’ll lay out a simple three-session observing plan to carry you through the month: supermoon and giants, Geminid weekend, and a quiet solstice night under the Ursids.

It’s an episode about time travel that ends with the most accessible time machine we have: walking outside, looking up, and catching ancient photons from the deep past on a cold December night.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or if you prefer listening on YouTube, visit our channel @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week, we’re doing something chaotic: we’re mapping the entire history of the universe onto the musical eras of Taylor Swift. And yes, the science is absolutely real.

From the Big Bang to the heat death of everything, each of Taylor’s albums becomes a chapter in the cosmic timeline. We’ll travel through the Primordial Universe, the formation of the first stars, galaxy evolution, black hole fireworks, the rise of dark energy, and the long, cold future of the cosmos — all through a Swiftian lens.

Later in the episode, we return to our usual sky tour. We’ll explore the waxing crescent Moon, bright views of Jupiter and Saturn, and the early arrival of the winter constellations. And we’ll take a moment to marvel at Hubble’s breathtaking new mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy, detailed enough that you can zoom in and see individual stars in another galaxy.

Think of this episode as a cosmic mix tape!

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or if you prefer listening on YouTube, visit our channel @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This episode begins with auroras and interstellar objects and ends somewhere much closer to the heart. After catching up on the week’s sky – dark moonless nights, Mercury in the dawn, meteor activity, and the quiet unraveling of comet 3I/Atlas – we shift into something different.

We’ll explore the idea of “sad astronomy”: the loneliness of deep space, the slow death of stars, the fragility of spacecraft, the silence of the cosmic void, and why so many stargazers feel a mix of awe and melancholy when they look up.

Along the way we wander through pop culture – the films Contact, and Interstellar, the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, the ghost glow of old light, the Arecibo message, Voyager’s endless journey, and the overview effect, the transformative shift astronauts feel when they see Earth from above.

It’s a meditation on distance, death, meaning, and the strange comfort found in the cold geometry of the cosmos.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

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This week on Star Trails, we let the universe decide.

We fire up a real quantum computer to generate pure randomness — the seed for a million-universe simulation of the famous Drake Equation. Each run explores how many intelligent civilizations might exist in our galaxy, from barren voids to thriving cosmic metropolises. The results are startling, the implications profound, and the method delightfully nerdy.

Along the way, we revisit the roots of the Drake Equation, the strangeness of quantum mechanics, and the poetry of probability. Then we step outside to the real night sky: the waning Moon, Saturn’s thinning rings, Jupiter’s bright rise, and the Taurid fireballs streaking through November darkness.

I also share how I photographed the recent Full Beaver Moon using Stellarium, PhotoPills, and The Photographer’s Ephemeris.

This episode blends code, cosmology, and contemplation.

Links mentioned:

• Sampling the Drake Equation with Python
• My Full Beaver Moon Cityscape
• Photo tools: Stellarium, PhotoPills, and The Photographer's Ephemeris

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

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This week on Star Trails, we explore the messages written across the cosmos — from faint comets in our own skies to the coded signals we’ve sent into the void. Drew shares a quick report from his local astronomy club’s fall star party, where hopes of photographing Comet A6 Lemmon met the familiar mix of excitement, haze, and grilled hamburgers under imperfect skies.

Then we turn from backyard observing to deep-space communication with a hands-on look at the Arecibo Message — the radio transmission beamed from Earth in 1974 as humanity’s mathematical greeting to the stars. We’ll break down what that signal said, how it was constructed, and whether an alien civilization could ever decode its meaning. Along the way, Drew recreates the original 1,679-bit message using Python code, transforms it into sound, and decodes it again to reveal the famous stick figure, DNA helix, and planetary map.

It’s a story about logic, language, and what it means to say hello to the universe — a reminder that every beam of light and burst of radio energy carries a trace of who we are.

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

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As Halloween approaches, we drift into one of astronomy’s most haunting questions: if life in the universe is so likely, where is everybody? This week, we explore the famous Fermi Paradox — from Enrico Fermi’s lunchroom question to Frank Drake’s mathematical quest for cosmic company.

Along the way, we revisit humanity’s attempts to speak into the void — the Arecibo Message, the golden records aboard Voyager, and the global volunteer army of SETI@Home. We also consider the possibilities: is the eerie silence a warning, a mystery, or simply a distance too vast for even radio waves to cross?

Plus, your night sky report for October 26 through November 1, 2025 — featuring a first-quarter Moon, Saturn and Jupiter shining bright, Mercury at greatest elongation, and a visit from Comet Lemmon.

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

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The veil between life and death is thin in late October, and not just on Earth. This week on Star Trails, we take a haunting journey through The Cosmic Graveyard, a place where dead suns still glow, galaxies devour one another, and the faint aftershocks of ancient explosions echo across time. From the slow cooling of white dwarfs to the bottomless depths of black holes, we explore the universe’s quietest afterlife.

But before venturing into that darkness, the night sky itself offers reason to stay up late. The Orionid meteor shower peaks under a new moon, delivering pristine, moonless skies for deep-sky observing. Saturn still commands the early evening, Jupiter gleams after midnight, and the autumn constellations fill the heavens with galaxies, clusters, and nebulae ripe for exploration.

Plus, a listener’s question sparks a timely detour into the strange beauty of black holes and the now-iconic image of a glowing ring surrounding a dark center. Is it art, or reality? We explain the physics behind those haunting visuals and how Einstein’s relativity sculpts light itself into the illusion we see.

So settle in beneath the cooling autumn sky, and listen as we wander the universe’s silent necropolis, where every dying star leaves behind a spark, and even the ashes of creation still shimmer with light.

Mentioned in this episode:

• What do black holes look like?

The nights are growing longer, the air is sharpening, and the Moon is finally stepping aside. In this week’s episode, we look to the skies from October 12th through the 18th, and discover a season in transition: Saturn still reigning in the south, Jupiter climbing before dawn, Venus returning to the morning sky, and the Orionid meteor shower quietly stirring to life. With the waning Moon, late-week skies will be perfect for deep-sky observing — from the Andromeda Galaxy to the Helix Nebula.

Then, we step into a stranger realm: The House of a Thousand Mirrors.

In this eerie cosmic funhouse, light bends, time folds, and a single distant galaxy can appear dozens of times across the sky. We explore the phenomenon of gravitational lensing — from the elegant Einstein Cross to the ghostly arcs of Abell clusters, and even a supernova that appeared twice in two different years. It’s astronomy that feels like science fiction, except it’s real.

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

Podcasting is better withRSS.com! If you're planning to start your own podcast,use our RSS.com affiliate link for a discount, and to help support Star Trails.

The Harvest Supermoon rises over crisp autumn nights as Saturn reigns in the southeast and Pegasus climbs the eastern sky. In this week’s episode of Star Trails, we examine the celestial highlights of October 5–11 — including lunar encounters with Saturn and the Pleiades, the Draconid meteor shower, and a check-in on interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS.

Then, as the night deepens, we open the cosmic case files: five enduring unsolved mysteries of the universe. From the invisible grip of dark matter to the baffling Hubble tension, these are the riddles that defy physics and haunt the night sky.

Whether you’re observing from your backyard or just viewing the stars in your imagination, this episode blends practical stargazing with spine-tingling cosmic intrigue.

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

Podcasting is better withRSS.com! If you're planning to start your own podcast,use our RSS.com affiliate link for a discount, and to help support Star Trails.

It’s been a short break due to technical issues, travel, and life in general, but the show is far from gone. Thanks to everyone who wrote in asking about it — your messages mean the world.

Here’s what’s happening in the night sky from September 28 – October 4:

• September 28: A waxing crescent Moon appears, climbing higher each evening.
• September 30: The Moon reaches first quarter, brightening the evening skies.
• Saturn is well placed for evening viewing, glowing steadily in the south.
• Jupiter rises late at night into the pre-dawn hours, a bright beacon in the east.
• It’s the quiet buildup before a busy October — meteor showers, conjunctions, and cosmic curiosities await.

The next episode (October 5) will feature a special segment on the unsolved mysteries of the cosmos—from strange planetary tilts to unexplained cosmic signals. Think of it as an astronomy-flavored Unsolved Mysteries.

Until then, clear skies!

This week we explore both the night sky and the cosmic tick-tock of time itself. The Moon waxes from half-lit to nearly full, while Saturn shines golden in Pisces with its razor-thin rings. Jupiter and Venus rule the morning skies, and the faint Aurigid meteors and Comet Lemmon make cameo appearances for early risers.

In the second half of the show, we dive into the strange and fascinating world of “time in space.” From NASA engineers living on Martian sols with their custom-built Mars watches, to the Omega Speedmasters strapped to Apollo astronauts’ suits, to the atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites that literally rely on Einstein’s relativity to keep us from getting lost—this is a journey through the cosmic heartbeat that guides explorers and Earthlings alike.

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

Podcasting is better withRSS.com! If you're planning to start your own podcast,use our RSS.com affiliate link for a discount, and to help support Star Trails.

This week we head outward to the seventh planet, where the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a brand-new moonlet orbiting Uranus. Barely six miles across, this tiny world is so small you could, in theory, walk around it in a single day. But is “walking” even possible when the surface gravity is only a whisper? We run the numbers and explore what it would feel like to live in such a micro-gravity landscape, where a careless jump could fling you into orbit.

Back under Earth’s skies, the nights begin in darkness. The week opens with a fresh New Moon, offering deep-sky windows before the crescent brightens. Saturn dominates the evening hours, Venus and Jupiter rule the dawn, and the Aurigids meteor shower brings a chance of surprise streaks before sunrise. We’ll also shine a light on three quieter constellations — Lacerta the Lizard, Aquarius the Water-Bearer, and Capricornus the Sea Goat — exploring the lore behind their faint patterns and the clusters, doubles, and globulars tucked among their stars.

From new moons both near and far, to the myths written across our own skies, this is a week for patient eyes, and a reminder of how scale and story intertwine in the universe.

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

Podcasting is better withRSS.com! If you're planning to start your own podcast,use our RSS.com affiliate link for a discount, and to help support Star Trails.

Under a rare seasonal Black Moon, this week’s sky rewards early risers and deep-sky wanderers alike. We start with a whisper-thin crescent slipping closer to the Sun each morning, then pivot to a dawn showcase where Mercury reaches greatest elongation while Venus and Jupiter stack higher above the horizon. On Tuesday and Wednesday a paper-thin crescent Moon joins the lineup—a perfect wide-field photo op—while evenings bring Saturn rising into prime viewing on its road to September opposition. With moonlight out of the way, scan the Milky Way for under-sung binocular treats: Delphinus the Dolphin, M11 (Wild Duck Cluster) in Scutum, and the Coathanger asterism in Vulpecula. You may even catch a few Perseid stragglers in the pre-dawn dark.

In the second half, we widen the frame to reveal the Milky Way’s “hidden companions”—dozens, maybe hundreds, of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies quietly orbiting our own. We unpack why they’re so hard to see (surface brightness, not just brightness), how modern surveys like SDSS and DES ferret them out, and why they matter for big questions about dark matter, galaxy growth, and the “missing satellites” problem.

Links in this episode:

• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Dark Energy Survey
• Gaia Sky

For more episodes and resources for backyard astronomers, visit www.startrails.show. Share the wonder of the stars with friends and continue your cosmic journey with us. Also, connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social, or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee!

Podcasting is better withRSS.com! If you're planning to start your own podcast,use our RSS.com affiliate link for a discount, and to help support Star Trails.