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Western Slope Skies
Every other Friday at about 8:10 am, repeats the following Wednesday at 7:00 pm

Western Slope Skies is produced by members of the Black Canyon Astronomical Society, who take a look at our local night sky. Hear it every other week at 8:10 am, after the Friday morning regional newscast,  and on the following Wednesday night at 7 PM, just before Global Express.

Do you have a question about the night sky or other astronomical topics? Ask it in our comments section below, or email us!

Latest Episodes
  • Recently, scientists announced detection of a persistent gravitational wave background (GWB), continually rippling the cosmos like a calm ocean breeze.
  • When people hear the name “Edwin Hubble,” they typically think of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the Hubble Space Telescope was built after Edwin Hubble’s death as a way to honor him.
  • The concept of scotobiology as a science was developed at a conference on light pollution held in Muskoka, Ontario, in 2003. Just as the word “photo” relates to light, “scoto” is the word that relates to “darkness.” Therefore, Scotobiology is the study of the role darkness plays in living organisms.
  • Have you ever wished upon a shooting star? For most of us, the novelty of wishing on a shooting star has faded since the days of our childhood.
  • The telescope’s most important discovery to date has been finding the farthest black hole located at the center of a rare type of galaxy.
  • On September 26, 2022, a NASA spacecraft ran into the asteroid Dimorphos at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. Far from being a multi-million-dollar boondoggle, this collision is precisely what astronomers had planned. The spacecraft was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART for short. The goal: to test technology that could potentially divert a large asteroid, should we ever locate one on a collision course with Earth.
  • From June 7-11, we will hold our first ever StarFest to celebrate Lake City’s starry skies and gather other dark sky advocates and interested folks from the western slope, the San Luis Valley, and throughout Colorado to see what more can be done to assure our precious night skies can be enjoyed by future generations. Unfortunately, light pollution is getting worse around the world so taking action is critical to turning things around.
  • Gleaming naked-eye apparition, Venus has captivated civilization since antiquity, garnering epithets of divine power and beauty-- Chac-Ek (“Great Star”) in Mayan, Jin-xing (“Golden Planet”) in Chinese, Phosphoros (“Lightbringer”) in Greek.
  • The Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes are world famous, but there’s another space observatory that’s contributing greatly to astronomy: The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia Mission.
  • Back when our beloved western cities were still young and their skies still dark, customers waited weeks or even months for basic household items to reach their local mercantile shelves.