Howdy Star Gazers and welcome to Star Trails.
I'm Drew and I'll be your guide to the night
sky for the week of October 26 through November
the 1st. The calendar is turning toward November
now and the stars have that unmistakable autumn
clarity. The air is a little sharper, the nights
come earlier, and the sky feels deeper, like
it's holding its breath before winter sets in.
Also, Halloween is later this week, and for our
final episode of October, we're going to examine
another eerie topic. In a universe as vast as
ours, we ask the question, where is everybody?
We're not looking for little green men or flying
saucers necessarily, but with all the potential
worlds that surround us, why haven't we received
any indication that someone or something is out
there? Could it be that we truly are alone? It's
called the Fermi paradox and we'll take a detour
into that and more in the second half of the
show. Before I get into the night sky report
for this week, I just have a quick update on
the show website. If you're a new listener to
the show, you might be wondering which other
episodes would be good to go back and listen
to. So, I've created a section on the website
StarTrails .Show with resources for beginning
astronomers and new listeners. On the site, you'll
see a new option in the top menu called Start
Here. On this page, you'll find a collection
of my favorite episodes from the more than 80
we've published since last year. Some of these
are very much aimed at the new astronomer, while
others cover topics that might be a bit off the
wall but still thought -provoking. I've also
compiled a collection of links that new astronomers
might find helpful, from some of the stargazing
apps I use to websites that are helpful for astronomers
at any skill level. And, as always, if you have
a question or comment about the show, you can
use the contact form on the site to send me feedback.
I really enjoy those listener questions. So with
that announcement out of the way, let's see what's
up in the sky this week. The moon begins as a
slender, waxing crescent and grows brighter each
night, reaching its first quarter phase on Wednesday.
Early in the week, you'll still have dark evening
skies, making it a prime time for faint objects
and binocular or small -scope observing. By midweek,
the moon will shine high at sunset and show off
sharp craters and mountain ranges along the terminator,
the line between lunar night and day. After that,
the moon transitions into a waxing gibbous, staying
up later into each night. That brighter moon
may wash out faint deep sky targets, but it opens
great opportunities for lunar surface photography
or simply enjoying the moonlit landscape. Farther
out, Saturn is still ruling the evening sky.
You'll find it glowing a soft yellow -white in
the southeast after sunset. climbing higher through
the night. Even a modest telescope will reveal
its rings and a few of its moons. Jupiter arises
later, around mid -evening, and dominates the
eastern sky. If you're up late or awake before
dawn, it's one of the showstoppers. Mercury makes
a fleeting appearance this week. On the 29th,
it will reach its greatest eastern elongation.
that's its furthest angular separation from the
Sun in the evening sky. Keep a clear view toward
the western horizon just after sunset, about
30 or so minutes after sundown. If the sky is
clear and the horizon is free of trees or buildings,
you might spot the elusive twilight planet. Mars
is fading low in the west after sunset and chasing
into twilight. And Venus is now a morning star
rising just before dawn in the east. It's worth
a glance if you're an early riser. Our solar
system is still hosting two special guests, and
if you've been active on any astrophotography
forums lately, you've probably seen some beautiful
images of at least one of them. Our photogenic
visitor is Comet C2025A6 or Comet Lemmon. Discovered
earlier this year by the Mount Lemmon Survey,
it's on a long -period orbit of roughly 1 ,150
years. It's currently brightening and may be
visible even with the naked eye under very dark
skies, though binoculars will make it much easier
to spot. For observers in North America, it's
best after sunset in the northwest to west sky.
It's low right now, but becoming more accessible.
If you have a clear horizon, try locating it
with binoculars in the constellation Boötes,
a little more than five degrees northeast of
Arcturus. And if you can't find it, just keep
enjoying those stunning images other astronomers
are capturing. It has a well -defined coma and
a long tail that looks like it's shimmering in
a cosmic breeze. The second visitor that has
many people intrigued is interstellar object
3I Atlas. This object arrived from outside our
solar system and it just cruised past Mars a
couple weeks ago. It's classified as an interstellar
object because its trajectory is hyperbolic,
meaning it's not bound to our Sun. And it's only
the third such object like this we've ever recorded.
Scientists are studying it carefully, though
for backyard observers it's faint and difficult
to spot. The buzz about it is largely thanks
to its interstellar origins. You may have seen
some of the speculation and conspiracies claiming
it might be artificial or alien in origin, but
mainstream science strongly supports the view
that it's a natural body. So while it's a fascinating
object to follow, keep your expectations grounded
because it's not much to look at, at least right
now. Now for the constellations and the quieter
stars of fall. We've mentioned them in the past
few episodes, but high overhead you'll find the
Great Square of Pegasus, that large distinctive
square shape marking the winged horse of myth.
From its top corner you can trace a line northeast
to the Andromeda Galaxy, our galactic neighbor.
A pair of binoculars will help you find it. North
of that, you'll find Cassiopeia, the queen of
the northern sky, hanging high from mid -northern
latitudes. Just below Cassiopeia lies one of
my favorite binocular targets, the double cluster
in Perseus, a pair of star clusters, bright and
compact, easily enjoyed even in modest skies.
The Milky Way isn't as obvious as it is in summer,
but if you're under dark skies early in the week
while the moon is still thin, you can trace its
faint river starting south and moving through
Cygnus, Cassiopeia, and into Perseus before it
drifts into the northeast. It's a subtle beauty,
less dramatic than the summer belt, but rewarding
all the same. Meteor activity from the Orionids
is tapering off, but don't rule out a stray meteor
before dawn. If you're out late, keep a casual
eye toward Orion rising in the east and you may
catch a bright one. As always, to truly appreciate
the fall sky, take a moment between targets.
Let your eyes adapt to darkness for about 10
to 15 minutes. With the heat of summer gone,
the air is clearer and your view reaches farther.
Next up, we'll step into that stillness more
deeply, exploring the vast silence between the
stars and why, in a universe so old and full
of worlds, no one seems to be there to answer
us. That's coming up after the break. Stay with
us. Welcome back. There's a kind of silence in
the cosmos that feels different from any other
kind. It isn't peaceful or serene. It's unsettling.
It's the silence of absence, the long echo of
a question that's never been answered. We call
it the Fermi paradox, the contradiction between
how likely life seems to be and how alone we
appear to be. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi
was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos.
The conversation turned to UFO sightings, and
Fermi simply asked, where is everybody? It was
both a joke and a revelation, because by that
time, astronomers already knew the galaxy was
ancient, 10 billion years older than the Earth,
and vast beyond comprehension. Even if just a
tiny fraction of those stars had planets and
an even tinier fraction had life, shouldn't we
see some sign of it? And keep in mind, at this
point in astronomy we hadn't discovered a single
exoplanet. That breakthrough was still more than
40 years away. A decade after Fermi's question,
astronomer Frank Drake tried to make sense of
it mathematically. In 1961 he hosted a small
meeting at the Green Bank Observatory in West
Virginia, the first gathering devoted to the
search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He
scribbled a simple formula on a blackboard to
structure their discussion, never imagining it
would become iconic. That formula became the
Drake Equation. It looks intimidating at a first
glance, full of variables and symbols, but the
idea is straightforward, and it's solvable using
basic algebra, provided you can fill in the variables.
Drake broke the problem into seven factors. How
many stars form each year? What fraction of those
have planets? How many of those worlds could
support life? How many of those worlds indeed
produce life? How often life develops intelligence?
How often intelligent life develops technology?
And finally, how long such civilizations can
send detectable signals into space? Simply multiply
those together and you get an estimate of how
many civilizations might be communicating right
now in the Milky Way. But the genius of the equation
wasn't its precision, it was its humility. It
showed us exactly where our ignorance lay. Every
variable is a mystery to be solved and each new
discovery exoplanets, biosignatures, radio surveys,
tightened the numbers a little more. Right now,
if you plug some hopeful numbers into the equation,
you might get a few dozen civilizations in our
galaxy right now. If you use more careful or
skeptical numbers, you might end up with a number
less than one, meaning we could be the only ones
here at this moment. The problem is, most of
the numbers in the equation are giant question
marks. We don't know how often life begins, how
often it becomes intelligent, or how long a civilization
like ours stays detectable before it disappears.
The math is strangely easy. It's the facts we
don't have. Drake didn't stop there. He also
co -founded Project Osma. the first modern SETI
experiment using the Green Bank Telescope to
listen for radio signals from two nearby stars.
The effort was modest, just a few months of listening,
but it sparked something profound. Soon after
came the idea that we shouldn't just listen,
but speak. In 1974, the Arecibo message was transmitted
toward the globular cluster M13. a tightly packed
group of stars 25 ,000 light years away. The
signal, composed entirely of binary digits, encoded
the numbers 1 through 10, the elements essential
to life, DNA's double helix, a stick figure representing
a human, the solar system, and the Arecibo telescope
itself. It was symbolic more than practical.
By the time the signal arrives, M13 will have
drifted away. But it was a statement. We are
here. A few years before Arecibo, in 1972 and
73, NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft became
the first human -made objects to leave the solar
system. Each carried a small aluminum plaque
etched with a map of our location in the galaxy
and the image of a man and woman greeting whoever
might find it. The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft
went further. Each carried a gold -plated record
sealed against time containing music from Bach
to Chuck Berry, greetings in dozens of languages
and sounds of our planet such as wind, rain,
laughter. thunder, bird song, and even the heartbeat
of a mother and child. Together, these were our
cosmic time capsules, drifting ever outward at
17 kilometers per second, bearing a message for
listeners we may never meet. We covered the Golden
Record in episode 52 and included many sounds
from it in the episode, so go back and check
it out if you missed it. By the 1990s, the search
took a new form. digital crowdsourcing. The SETI
at Home project turned ordinary computers into
a distributed radio telescope. Millions of volunteers,
and I was one of them and maybe you were too,
downloaded screensavers that processed chunks
of data collected by the Arecibo Observatory,
searching for narrow -band signals that might
indicate alien transmissions. For two decades
it quietly scanned billions of frequencies running
in the background on computers around the world.
Humans, united by curiosity, gave their idle
CPU cycles to the search for cosmic company.
It was science as global collaboration and the
largest volunteer computing project in history.
Sadly, SETI at home never discovered any alien
signals. The program went into hibernation in
2020, but its legacy continues in new AI -driven
searches like Breakthrough Listen, which now
monitors billions of stars with unprecedented
sensitivity. And yet the silence persists. Which
brings us back to Fermi's haunting question.
Some have speculated a great filter, a stage
in evolution so perilous that few make it past.
Perhaps intelligence carries the seeds of its
own destruction. Ecological collapse, nuclear
war, or even artificial intelligence run amok.
If the filter lies behind us, we're lucky. If
it lies ahead, the silence may be a warning.
Others suggest more poetic explanations. Maybe
civilizations retreat inward, turning to virtual
worlds richer than reality itself. Maybe they
transcend physical space altogether, existing
as patterns of energy or information. Or maybe
the galaxy is a dark forest where every civilization
hides in terror, knowing that to announce their
presence might invite annihilation. In that sense,
silence isn't failure, it's a strategy. And then
there's the humbling possibility that we simply
don't know how to listen. Alien intelligence
might communicate in ways beyond our comprehension,
through neutrinos or gravitational waves or quantum
entanglement. Their language could be encoded
in magnetic fields or stellar oscillations. To
them, our radio beacons might be as primitive
as cave paintings. Personally, I believe in the
simplest explanation. Space is unimaginably vast.
The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is more than
four light years away. That's about 25 trillion
miles. Even if we sent a message traveling at
light speed, it would take more than eight years
for a round -trip conversation. And that's our
closest neighbor. The rest of the galaxy stretches
across a hundred thousand light years. Also,
radio waves, like light, weaken as they travel.
What begins as a clear signal near its source
dissolves into noise over cosmic distances. If
you're involved in ham radio, you've likely seen
signals fade dramatically over just hundreds
of miles. The signals that escape Earth fade
into the background hum of the universe long
before they reach most of the stars we dream
about. It's not like the beginning of the movie
Contact, where we zoom into the solar system
from light years away, hearing our earliest broadcasts
echo through the void as clear as they were the
day they were made. It's entirely possible that
the cosmos is teeming with voices each calling
out into the dark But none strong enough to bridge
the gulf between them a million lonely transmitters
all speaking all unheard Maybe the idea of that
loneliness creates a feeling of existential dread
and here's another eerie Halloween thought When
you look up, much of the starlight falling on
your eyes began its journey long before humans
even existed. It crossed unimaginable distances,
unbothered by our loneliness, carrying no reply,
just photons from ancient suns. And the silence
isn't nothing. The quiet between the stars may
be the most profound message of all. A reminder
that the universe is vast enough to contain both
our fears and our hopes, our solitude and our
longing. If the stars spoke to you this week
or if a question's been on your mind, I'd love
to hear it. Visit StarTrails .Show where you
can contact me and explore past episodes. Be
sure to follow Star Trails on Blue Sky and YouTube.
Links are in the show notes. Until we meet again
beneath the stars, clear skies everyone.