Western Slope Skies

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 these 23 minutes with no Moon, because the early stages of penumbral eclipses are almost undiscernible from Earth.

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 my stars (Under my control, ah)”.

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 underlying reality is governed by motion, frequency and structure.

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.

When we gaze at the Moon in the future, we’ll contemplate that we humans have extended our reach to Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. Perhaps this will be our first step toward making human life interplanetary.

Let’s hope for clear skies on the morning of March 3, when the Western Slope will be treated to a total lunar eclipse. During the early hours of March 3, the Moon will move through Earth’s shadow, creating one of the more eerie sights in nature.

Who doesn’t like a pretty cloud in the sky? As familiar as the Sun and the Moon, clouds assume a wide array of shapes and sizes—from ominous cumulonimbus to cottony altocumulus, feathery cirrus to leaden stratus, and various hybrids in-between. We see them year-round worldwide, boding fair and foul weather alike.

How did life originate? Did it form on Earth or elsewhere in the solar system and was it seeded on Earth by impact of an asteroid? Will life eventually be wiped out by an asteroid? While we may never know the answers to these questions, scientists are attempting to study as much as possible about the origins of life and the possibilities of future asteroid collisions with the Earth.

On a clear night if you look in the sky towards true north, you’ll notice a star that seems to never change direction. If you’re able to find this star, it is called Polaris.

An article in the international journal Nature Cities by Lvlv Wang and co-authors document the effect of light pollution on the growing season in 428 Northern Hemisphere cities between 2014 and 2022. They note that the typical growing season is controlled by heat and light. While cities are getting warmer due to climate change, they are also getting brighter due to excessive lighting. After controlling for the warming effect, they found that the excessive light was extending the growing season.

The unappreciated dung, or scarab beetle, an insect that evolved about 130 million years ago, must accomplish its nocturnal task under increasingly difficult conditions; chief among them, light pollution.

Awe, as researchers Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner explain, is a transformative emotion. It soothes your nervous system, quiets self-doubt, fosters kindness, builds connection, and gives life meaning. Under a starry sky, awe feels like the universe reaching out, reminding you that you’re part of something greater, never truly isolated.

Have you noticed fewer insects around your porch light or fewer splattered bugs on your windshield? You're not alone. Scientists are calling this a new crisis—the "insect apocalypse"—and artificial light at night is a major cause.

We know that waterfowl like geese migrate at night, but did you know that songbirds do too? Beneath Western Colorado’s vast, star-strewn skies, migratory birds like Warbler’s, and Swainson’s Thrush embark on a breathtaking odyssey, their wings slicing through the night during peak migrations in May and September, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.