Night sky

It's not about harvesting sunlight.

It's about having access and... capitalizing and commodifying not just light but the night sky so who is paying the price that's the ecologies that's our day and night rhythm that are we we because they're these are light beams of around six kilometers that are being on the ground for harvesting, for example, harvesting sun.

But there are also the U.S. Army has invested in it.

There are big investors of technological capital who are investing in it, Sequoia, among other.

It's not about making profit out of a product.

It's about access, right? It's about having, being able to, it's about rent, about getting rent out of this system.

And the same is going on with the night sky at this moment, because Reflect Orbital wants to launch 15,000 satellites into the night sky, which means if they are really able to, it will brighten the sky four times than it is now.

It means that we have a permanent full moon every night.

I'm Mark Breen.

Welcome to Night Sky for Wednesday, September 23rd.

Our first full day of calendar fall includes an interesting constellation emerging from the twilight hugging the southwest horizon near 730 this evening.

As you look to the southwest on the next clear evening this week, The reddish beacon Antares shines as the most obvious star, known to stargazers and astronomers as the heart of the scorpion.

This balance scale lies sideways, so the chains holding the weighing dishes dangle to the left.

The traditional dates of Libra the Scales start on the fall equinox, representing the balance of days and nights, marking the position of the sun 5,000 years ago.

The scale's other identity Thursday on Night Sky.

Night Sky is a production of Vermont Public and the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium.

For now, we can simply begin with the first quiet fact.

A star is a point of light in the night sky.

That is the simplest possible way to put it.

Step outside after the sun has gone down, wait for your eyes to adjust, and there they are, tiny pinpricks scattered overhead.

Distance shrinks them to dots.

Put anything far enough away and it looks tiny, no matter how large it actually is.

So the tiny points you see in the night sky are really giants, each one a colossal sphere of super-hot material burning away in the dark.

Stars give off light and heat.

You yourself are a product of these partnerships, shaped by relationships extending back to the beginning of life on Earth.

The night sky, when viewed far from city lights, reveals the Milky Way, a river of light stretching across the darkness.

This river is not just beautiful, it is a map of our galaxy.

Billions of stars arranged in a spiral structure rotating around a massive black hole.

Most stars in the Milky Way are too distant to see as individual points of light, but together they create this luminous river.

For most of human history, people looked up at this sight and felt wonder and humility.

The night sky connected people to something vast and unknowable.

The stars taught ancient peoples to navigate, to tell time, to understand seasons.

After that, of course, things get a little more serious and honestly a little personal, I'd say.

that beautiful night sky you love, the one full of stars.

Well, private companies might be about to ruin it, to be honest, for every single one of us, everywhere on the Earth.

And here's the kicker, international law might not be able to stop them.

Hundreds of erupting volcanoes, oceans of fire, and NASA's Juno probe just took a peek beneath the surface to crack the big mystery.

What is powering all of this up? What lurks down there in the dark? Stick around and find out.

So we've got volcanoes, black holes, a wounded little rover and a battle for the night sky itself.

I told you it was a big one.

Howdy stargazers and welcome to this episode of Star Trails.

My name is Drew and I'll be your guide to the night sky for the week of September the 6th to the 12th.

Over the past few episodes, we've followed galaxies through some almost unimaginably slow transformations.

We looked at distant little red dots and asked what galaxies were like during their mysterious adolescence.

And we explored how repeated collisions may have gradually shifted the Milky Way's orientation in space.

This week, we'll complete a loose trilogy by examining the stellar wreckage left behind by those encounters, and how ghostly streams of stars can preserve a galaxy's history while tracing the invisible dark matter surrounding it.

Later in the show, we'll take a look at this week's night sky during what will be a nice dark observation period.

Whether you're tuning in from the backyard or the balcony, I'm glad you're here.