Star Trails: A Weekly Astronomy Podcast

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.socialIf 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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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 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.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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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.

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.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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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.

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.socialIf 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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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 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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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 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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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.

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.socialIf 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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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 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.socialIf 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!Podcasting is better with RSS.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.