Suppose you were an astronomer and someone offered you, at no cost, two giant mirrors for telescopes in space, each valued at more than 250 million dollars. Sound too good to be true? It actually happened at NASA. In January 2011, the National Reconnaissance Office, a U.S. spy agency, offered NASA two, surplus 94-inch diameter telescope mirrors with related hardware. At that time, NASA was planning a space telescope with a 52 inch- diameter main mirror called WFIRST, an acronym that stood for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope. A larger mirror exactly matching NASA’s needs would greatly enhance the scientific return from such a telescope. So, in 2012 NASA revised the plan to use one of these 94-inch diameter mirrors. After more than a decade of development, this telescope was launched into space on August 30, 2026.

Colorado is home to several International DarkSky Places, including Paonia right here in the KVNF’s listening area. Naturita, Nucla, and Norwood are part of that growing statewide commitment to preserving natural darkness – and along the Unaweep Tabeguache Scenic & Historic Byway, that commitment becomes visible the moment the sun goes down. If you’ve ever traveled the UTB, you know it’s more than a road. It’s a 133mile ribbon of canyoncountry, redrock walls, winding rivers, and quiet mesas. Highway 141 and 145 carry you through landscapes shaped by deep time - and when night falls, that landscape expands upward. The sky becomes part of the scenery.

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?”