Western Slope Skies

Colorado’s night-sky heritage stretches across the Western Slope – from Paonia to the West End – and Naturita, Nucla, and Norwood are proud to be part of that constellation of DarkSky Communities. Last week, we talked about the lost art of looking up. Today, I want to explore something connected - something we don’t talk about nearly enough: accessibility.Natural darkness is one of the most accessible experiences we have. You don’t need special equipment. You don’t need technical knowledge. You don’t need to hike miles into the backcountry. You simply need a place where the night is allowed to be night. That’s what makes the Western Slope of Colorado so special.

Exoplanets are planets beyond our Solar System. Speculated to exist for centuries, the first exoplanets were only discovered in the 1990s. But since then, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed, and that list grows longer every month. So, some of these exoplanets must be like Earth, right? Well, we still don’t know if that’s true! The easiest exoplanets to find are worlds that orbit very close to their parent stars, and are often fiercely hot, or massive gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System. No exoplanet like Earth that orbits a Sun-like star has yet been found.

Have you traveled along a dark road and been temporarily blinded by bright oncoming headlights? I think we all can relate.Vehicle headlights are among the most widespread and least regulated sources of artificial light at night. A full moon produces roughly 0.1–0.3 lux. Lux measures how bright light appears on a surface, specifically the amount of light that falls on a given surface. One lux equals one lumen per square meter. Lumens measure the total light output from a source. Lux depends on distance and beam focus: the closer you are to a light source or the more focused the light beam, the higher the lux reading.

If you’ve ever stepped outside on a clear night here on the Western Slope, especially away from the lights of the town, you’ve probably noticed something so obvious we rarely question it; the sky is dark. Not just shadowed – but truly, deeply dark.It seems simple, but for astronomers, this idea leads to one of the most interesting questions in science, If the universe is full of stars, why isn’t the night sky bright everywhere you look?

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?”

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.