Howdy Star Gazers and welcome to this episode
of Star Trails. My name is Drew and I'll be your
guide to the night sky for the week of November
the 16th through the 22nd. This week the moon
leaves us for a few nights, revealing deep sky
objects and clearing the way for dual meteor
showers. We'll check in on Interstellar Object
3i, and hopefully you caught the Northern Lights
last week. Later in the show, we'll take a detour
into something a little different. Something
that's been on my mind lately. That feeling that
creeps in when you look at the night sky and
wrestle with its scale. Some people call it sad
astronomy. It's about the loneliness of deep
space, the weight of old light, and the knowledge
that everything must one day come to an end.
Whether you're joining us from the backyard,
the balcony, or just your imagination, I'm glad
you're here. So grab a comfortable spot and let's
get started. Before we get into the episode,
we need to talk about the Northern Lights, because
last week the Sun was once again putting on a
show. If you were like me, you were glued to
social media feeds watching folks post images
of last Tuesday's low -latitude aurora. It wasn't
quite as dramatic as the outburst last spring,
at least not in my neck of the woods. All the
images I saw locally were mostly just a red sky
glow, those higher altitude aurora that I find
particularly vexing to see. Owing to both my
own red -green color blindness and the way our
eyes work, color is hard to see in dim conditions.
That's why your camera can often see aurora better
than our eyes can. I didn't try to photograph
it myself, but I enjoyed seeing everyone else's
efforts. Another coronal mass ejection blasted
Earth the following day, Wednesday, and initial
reports said we'd get aurora even farther south.
By the time nightfall arrived, the prediction
had shifted and, as far as I know, there were
no northern lights down south on that day. Too
bad, because I had my camera and tripod loaded
up in a road trip to a dark site planned. If
some of you caught photos of the light show,
visit starrtrails .show and use the contact form
there to let me know what you saw. I'd love to
see what it looked like in your backyard. If
you've been following any space news lately,
you may have already heard that the excitement
over interstellar object 3I Atlas may be coming
to an end, as it looks like the object has broken
up during its close approach to the Sun. 3I Atlas
is only the third confirmed interstellar object
to drift through our solar system, following
Oumuamua, that's one eye, and Comet Borisov,
two eye. What makes ATLAS intriguing is that
unlike Oumuamua's enigmatic pancake or cigar
-like geometry, ATLAS presented as more of a
conventional comet, a nucleus with a modest coma.
Over the last several weeks, astronomers have
reported asymmetric brightening, a diffuse tail
inconsistent with a single intact nucleus, and
a slight shift in the object's photometric center.
all of which hint that Atlas might be breaking
up, shedding fragments as it approaches perihelion.
Interstellar comets have hard lives. They spend
millions of years adrift in space where the volatile
ices that hold them together become fragile,
desiccated, and riddled with microfractures.
When such an object suddenly gets slammed with
the full solar onslaught, heating tidal forces,
and radiation, those ancient weaknesses can give
way. If Atlas is fragmenting, it's probably because
sunlight is turning its interior gases back into
pressure, popping it apart like a cosmic blister.
Observatories tracking it have suggested either
multiple small fragments or a single nucleus
that's beginning to shed material in uneven spurts,
which creates that ghostly broadened tail. Break
up or not, Atlas is writing its autobiography
in real time, and we get to read it. Fragmenting
comets reveal their internal structure, the density,
the layering, the mix of ice and dust, better
than any intact pass ever could. And in Atlas's
case, everything we learn is a direct sample
of another star system. Even if Atlas dies on
approach, the disintegration itself becomes the
science. The sky is a polite guest this week.
No lunar glare, no drama, just clean darkness
for deep sky enthusiasts and astrophotographers.
We're sitting in a sweet spot on the lunar calendar.
The moon is fading into a waning crescent tonight,
shrinking each morning, and it's a new moon by
the 20th. That means we get a midweek window
of truly dark skies, the kind of darkness that
makes the dim stuff pop. By the 22nd, there's
the barest sliver of a waxing crescent after
sunset, but it's too low and too subtle to wash
anything out. The planets are arranged in a neat
little lineup this week. Saturn hangs in the
southwest after sunset, mellow, steady, and easy
to pick out. Jupiter rises earlier each night
and dominates the late evening sky, bright enough
to stop you in your tracks. And very early in
the morning, especially by the 21st and 22nd,
Mercury begins its climb into the pre -dawn sky.
It's low, it's fleeting, and the horizon needs
to be clear, but it's there. Venus is technically
in the dawn too, but so low and faint this month
that it's not worth chasing. With the moon out
of the way, the constellations take center stage.
Cassiopeia is high in the northeast. And right
below it sits Perseus, carrying the gorgeous
double cluster, a binocular object that is always
a crowd pleaser. And in the east, the winter
stars Capella, Aldebaran, and the first hints
of Orion's belt are beginning to claim the late
night sky. Every night of November is an inch
closer to full wintertime brilliance. Now for
the really fun stuff, meteor activity. We're
nearing the peaks of two November showers, and
both benefit from the new moon darkness. First
are the Leonids, famous for their historic storms,
though this year they're modest, maybe a handful
per hour. They leave fast, bright streaks, and
with the moon gone, they stand out beautifully.
The Leonids peak around the 17th and 18th, so
the early part of the week is the best time to
catch them. Then, later in the week, the Alpha
monoceratids get a brief mention. They're normally
minor, but they're unpredictable, and every so
often they produce a sudden spike of activity.
With the dark skies, it should be easy to catch
a meteor or two, leaving a quick autograph across
the sky. Coming up, does the night sky make you
sad? Do you find yourself questioning your own
existence as you ponder the scale of the universe?
Does the eventual heat death of the cosmos make
you uneasy? If so, you're not alone. This is
the realm of sad astronomy, and it's a real phenomenon.
After the break, we're going to have a cosmic
meditation of sorts on distance, on loss, on
why we look up even when the universe doesn't
look back. Think of it as a melancholy stretch
of road between curiosity and hard science. It
sounds cold, but a promise will end in a warm
place. I'll take you there after the break. Stay
with us. Welcome back. Astronomy is often described
as a science of wonder, stars, nebula, the promise
of distant worlds. But behind that wonder, there's
another feeling, harder to name. It's the silence
after the signal fades. It's the awareness that
most of what we see is already gone. That's sad
astronomy. It's the emotional gravity that comes
from realizing how brief we are. and how magnificent
the universe remains without us. Sad astronomy
isn't hopeless, it's honest, and honesty, like
starlight, travels a long way. Astronomy may
very well be the study of everything that's already
gone. Every photon we catch in our telescopes
left its home before any of us were born. Some
of those stars don't even exist anymore. Space
isn't so much a place as it's a memory stretched
across time. For the past few episodes, we've
been knee -deep in data, models, probabilities,
and even quantum computing. Tonight, I just want
to step back and look at what all of it means,
even if the beauty hurts a little. Some of you
may recall we didn't have any episodes back in
September. Part of that was simply the slings
and arrows of life, but it was mostly because
I had to take some weeks to reflect on my own
tiny place in the universe, having just reached
that gloomy age of 50. I'm sure you've noticed
our topics lately have been a little meta, these
large -scale ideas about our own existence. You
could argue this podcast has been in sad astronomy
mode now for the past few weeks. I'd never even
heard the term sad astronomy until recently,
but it's real. It's generally the study of how
things end, the deaths of stars, galaxies, and
the universe itself. But it also deals with how
we feel when we look up at night. The vastness
that makes us feel alone and tiny. The isolation
we experience as specialists in a hobby where
we often find ourselves physically alone, under
a dark sky in the cold, chasing meaning and truth
through the chromatic aberrations of eyepieces,
fogging lenses, and slightly misaligned mirrors.
Many, many people experience sadness in astronomy.
Just searching for the term sad astronomy reveals
endless forums and websites where observers wonder
why space makes them feel dread and despair.
So in this episode, I want to share a kind of
essay told in five parts. Five brief reflections
about distance, death, and endurance. and each
one is a different way of hearing the universe's
song. A telescope is essentially a time machine.
When we look outward, we look backward. the light
from Andromeda began its journey two and a half
million years ago, long before the first humans
carved symbols in stone. Even the light from
our sun is eight minutes old, a gentle delay
between cause and effect, presence and memory.
Astronomy is the only science where the past
never stops arriving, and the deeper we peer,
the lonelier it becomes. The cosmos is expanding,
galaxies are slipping away beyond reach. Someday,
the universe will outgrow our ability to see
it. What will we do when the sky goes dark, not
from clouds, but from time itself? Light has
a speed limit, and beyond that line, there's
only silence. Science fiction has tried to translate
that silence for us. In the film Contact, Jodie
Foster listens for a signal, not just from aliens,
but from meaning itself. In Interstellar, Matthew
McConaughey crosses the galaxy chasing love and
time, and Anne Hathaway's character, in a monologue
I once found very cringey, insists that love
is the one thing that transcends dimensions.
yet understand maybe it's some evidence some
Artifact of a higher dimension that we can't
consciously perceive Love is the one thing we're
capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions
of time and space Carl Sagan said it better for
small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable
only through love Not as a force of nature, but
as a human survival instinct. We invent connections
to make the infinite feel habitable. These films
are meditations on cosmic loneliness wrapped
in the search for meaning. And those aren't the
only ones. There's Solaris, the prototype for
cosmic loneliness. Of course, 2001, A Space Odyssey.
existential, indifferent, and yet simultaneously
glorifying the evolution of man as he takes his
first baby steps into deep space. And add Astra,
which tells us the further out we journey, the
more alone we are. A nebula is a graveyard that
glows. It's the ashes of a star, still burning
with borrowed light. Every atom of carbon in
our bodies was made in one of those funerals.
We are literally the residue of dying suns. When
I look through my telescope or photograph something
like the Crab Nebula, I'm watching the aftermath
of a death that happened before there were pyramids.
The light just took this long to reach us. Sad
astronomy means standing in that afterglow, seeing
beauty born from catastrophe, and realizing that's
also what it means to be alive. Eventually, no
new stars will form, the universe will suffer
heat death, and all warmth and structure will
fade. Right now, 99 .9 % of the universe is actually
empty. And light's speed limit means even if
we could travel that fast, that 1 % will be largely
unreachable. We've always answered the universe's
silence with noise. In 1974, we sent the Arecibo
message toward a distant star cluster, a digital
portrait of who we are, transmitted once, never
to be repeated. Two spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and
2, carry golden records with the sound of Earth,
thunder, birds, Beethoven, and a human heartbeat.
They've now left the solar system, still whispering
faint radio signals back home. Chances are, they'll
outlive every city we've built. Someday, some
distant traveler, or perhaps no one, may find
them. We send these messages not because we expect
an answer, but because silence is unbearable.
Even Opportunity, the Mars rover, left us a kind
of message. My battery is low, and it's getting
dark. That line wasn't in its code. It was in
ours We made it poetic because we couldn't stand
the idea of something we built Dying alone on
a faraway planet Part four entropy and memory
Entropy is the universe's tendency toward disorder
But that phrase doesn't quite capture the scale
of it. Entropy is the quiet drift of every system
from stars to spacecraft toward breakdown. Heat
spreads out, metal fatigues, orbits decay, temperature
differences flatten out until everything reaches
the same cold final equilibrium. It's inevitability.
A star cools, a planet, like Mars for instance,
loses its atmosphere. Entropy is the cost of
structure in a universe that prefers smoothness
over complexity. It's the universe's quiet metronome.
It ticks in the cooling of stars, the fading
of orbits, and the corrosion of mirrors and old
observatories. Even Arecibo's great dish, once
the ear of our planet, lies broken in the jungle
now, listening to nothing. Space exploration,
while not astronomy per se, must conform to entropy.
Where were you and Challenger exploded after
liftoff in 1986? I was in the fifth grade, and
that tragedy was a touchstone for my generation.
I remember seeing the shuttle Columbia on its
first launch in 1981 when I was in preschool.
Twenty years later, as a journalist, I wrote
about its destruction over Texas. And I hesitate
to even mention Leica, the dog sent into space
by the Soviets in 1957. Her one -way trip into
orbit is just too sad for a retelling. Yet, it's
entropy at work. Without decay, there would be
no change, no color, no sound. Every photograph
I take is a small rebellion against that, a way
of saying this existed once. But without death,
there's no light. We can't stop the universe
from unraveling, but we can mark the pattern
in its threads. Part five the warm horizon Not
every ending is tragic light still travels the
photons that left a star a billion years ago
have finally arrived to meet your eye your camera
and your curiosity Astronauts talk about something
called the overview effect that moment when you
see Earth floating in the black. Not on a screen,
not through a photograph, but with your own eyes.
From orbit, borders disappear, conflicts shrink,
the noise of daily life drops away, and all that's
left is a thin, trembling line of atmosphere,
keeping every one of us alive. Many astronauts
describe an unexpected wave of emotion, grief,
awe, protectiveness, A kind of fierce tenderness
for a world they never realized was so fragile.
Some say it rewired them forever. Seeing Earth
from that distance didn't make them feel small.
It made them feel connected. The overview effect
is the counterpoint to sad astronomy. While most
of us won't be venturing into space anytime soon,
we can gaze at the pale blue dot photo. Voyagers
last look back at Earth. Smaller than a pixel,
suspended in a sunbeam. All of human experience
compressed into an inconsequential dot floating
in a void. Maybe sad astronomy isn't really sad.
Maybe it's gratitude stretched across the dark.
Because every time we look up, we become part
of the same equation that made the stars. We're
not outside the story. We are the story. And
perhaps that's what movies like Contact and Interstellar
were trying to tell us. That even when the cosmos
is indifferent, connection gives it meaning.
Love, curiosity, memory, these aren't cosmic
forces, they're human ones. In a universe that
forgets, we remember. And that's our small rebellion.
If you found this episode interesting, please
share it with a friend who might enjoy it. The
easiest way to do that is by sending folks to
our website, StarTrails .Show. And if you want
to support the show, use the link on the site
to buy me a coffee. It really helps. 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.