A bi-weekly short feature on astronomy, produced by members of the Black Canyon Astronomical Society.Link for podcast apps:https://www.kvnf.org/podcast/western-slope-skies/rss.xml
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On August 27 the Sun sets late, around 7:46 PM MDT, which allows enough time to get home from work or school, eat dinner, and get ready for the lunar show. The eclipse begins at 7:21 PM MDT, before the moon rises locally at around 7:44 PM MDT. That’s when the eastward-moving Moon first touches the partial shade of the penumbra, the “less dark” part of Earth’s shadow. But we won’t miss much during…
In 2024, the popular Korean girl group aespa came out with a song called “Supernova,” a creative song that blends astronomy and art, representing the confidence and energy of the members, Karina, Winter, Giselle, and Ningning. When reading the English translation of the song, we can read lyrics like “bring the light of a dying star”, or “The explosion inside me is so huge, Made from every cell of…
Here's where evolutionary biology meets modern medicine. Our ancestors lived with natural light-dark cycles for millions of years. Industrial lighting, shift work, and digital screens represent a 150-year-old experiment—an evolutionary eyeblink. Our Paleolithic circadian systems now face unprecedented challenges.
Remember nights when you tossed and turned, desperately trying to get some sleep? I think we can all relate. Circadian rhythm disorders, known as chronodisruption, arise when the body’s internal clock—governed by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus—falls out of sync with environmental light-dark cycles.
What happens when a light switch disrupts billions of years of evolution?
Circadian rhythm—our endogenous biological clock—has synchronized life with Earth’s rotation for billions of years, from bacteria to humans. How does this specifically affect humans?
In 2025, Jamie Perce with the Western Slope Dark Sky Coalition presented an excellent series on circadian rhythm. The importance of this topic is prompting a deeper dive in 2026 with a five part series.
If you have attended a night sky outreach event, conducted, for example, by the Black Canyon Astronomical Society or the Western Colorado Astronomy Club, then you have heard mention of the distance to a star or galaxy measured in light years, i.e. how long the light has been travelling to reach Earth. You might wonder “Do the photons get tired or slow down as time passes?”
In astronomy, we rely heavily on visual information. Images from telescopes, graphs of light curves, plotted orbits, spectra and diagrams. Most of the ways we understand astronomy today are shown through these two-dimensional formats. It's almost always something we look at. But vision is only one way of interpreting information. From quantum physics to the largest structures in the universe, the…
We all know how weird black holes are, but did you know there is another type of star that is just as strange? Welcome to the universe of neutron stars.
