Exploring Dark Skies

Where are the darkest skies in the US? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice learn about dark sky efforts, light pollution, and cool places to stargaze with guests astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd, photographer Babak Tafreshi, and national park ranger Bradley Mills.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This episode is brought to you by Travel Nevada dot com. Up next on StarTalk, we devote an entire episode to stargazing, sponsored by Travel Nevada. Why them? Well, they got clear skies, being mostly in the desert. Among my guests, we have my friend and astrophysics colleague, Matt O'Dowd. We also have Babat Tifreshi, who's a National Geographic astrophotographer. Yeah, they got those too. And also Bradley Mills, who's a park ranger. A park ranger who specializes in the astronomy programs of the National Park. All that and more, coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my coach, Chuck Nice. Chuck?

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, you know, we do a lot of topics, but I think there's a topic we don't give enough attention to.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's the search for dark skies on Earth.

• 1:17Chuck Nice?

  You know?

• 1:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as a city person, you know, I grew up in New York City.

• 1:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole notion of a dark sky didn't have many meaning. Because my only dark sky was the local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so-

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  An artificial dark sky. But in a way, in a way, that's kind of cool. They created a dark sky just for you.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, knowing I'd come back a few decades later and serve as director.

• 1:42Chuck Nice?

  Director. And you know what? And they're just like, God, that was a good investment. Look at that.

• 1:49Chuck Nice?

  Look how that worked out.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to show you that I'm not weirdly odd in this way.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not the only one out there who loves dark skies. Let me bring on my friend and colleague, Matt O'Dowd, is a fellow astrophysicist, a host of PBS Spacetime. I want to ask you about that. Associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Lehman College at CUNY, the City University of New York. And you're also an associate here at the American Museum of Natural History. So, Matt, how you doing, Matt? Doing great, Neil. Thank you very much. Good to see you. So, Matt. What do dark skies mean to you? Especially since they're not everywhere. You gotta like, look for them and find them.

• 2:32Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. I grew up in the suburbs, you know? Maybe not quite as bright as New York City, but uh, I, you know, I remember my first dark sky as a kid. You know, I thought, there are, there are so many stars, you know, in my little suburban neighborhood. You know, there's at least a hundred.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 2:52Matt O'Dowd?

  But then, you go to the outback Australia, where it's pretty dry anyway. Um, and you look up and, and you can't even find a spot of sky that doesn't have a star.

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 3:05Matt O'Dowd?

  Spectacular.

• 3:06Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Matt, the, I didn't see a dark sky that matched what I saw in a planetarium. And so I went deep into Pennsylvania. Far, I had to cross New Jersey, you know, cross the moat around Manhattan.

• 3:21Chuck Nice?

  You say that like, it was like such a, a drudgery. Oh, the drudgery. I actually, I actually had to, I had to swim across the Hudson. I swam across the Hudson and then we got into a Conestoga wagon and made our way to Pennsylvania, across New Jersey.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Pennsylvania is rural. And then I got to see a night sky, you know, as nature had intended it. Not even realizing that that's just a sky in the Northeast, where there's humidity, there's some light leakage on the horizon, because even hundreds of miles away, you can see city lights. And so, why don't you remind us what the value of being in a desert is for stargazing?

• 4:06Matt O'Dowd?

  You know, there, there are two big things, right? There's the fact that deserts are big and so you're probably far away from any town. People don't build a lot of towns in the middle of deserts. Uh, I, I was at a town in the middle of the biggest desert in Australia. So Alice Springs, which is in the dead center of Australia. Um, recently, actually. And uh, I mean, you just get a little way out of town and look up. And um, I don't remember seeing a sky like that. So you, you have the proximity to light. And as you say, you want to be hundreds of miles away. Okay, in the middle of Australia, you're a thousand miles away. But then there's the dryness and the dryness is key. Um, so the, the water in the atmosphere causes as, um, as the light trickles down from the stars,

• 4:51Matt O'Dowd?

  it, it sort of bounces the light around all its way down.

• 4:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trickles is moving at the speed of light dude, trickles, trickles.

• 4:58Matt O'Dowd?

  On a cosmic scale.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 5:01Matt O'Dowd?

  That's a crawl. Eight minutes to get from the sun, it's like.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:05Matt O'Dowd?

  Oh, I can make it, I can make it.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Know what they would call it?

• 5:08Matt O'Dowd?

  Trickles down.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trickling, but okay, yeah, go on.

• 5:10Matt O'Dowd?

  It's a patter. But it also bounces around. So when you look up at the stars in, you know, somewhere where, where there's some humidity, uh, you, you see these blurry blobs. Okay. So you, so you, and you don't really know, you don't really notice until you see the sky from a desert or a dry mountain top, which is where we like to build our observatories. Then there are these pinpricks, these crystal clear pinpricks. Um, and man, it's, it's stunning. It's like at the Hayden Planetarium.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just like the planetarium. So many people don't think of the water molecule as something that matters in the night. So it just gives you rain, of course, but the, uh, you want to remove all the best observatories in the world are in deserts. For this reason, yeah. Yeah, you don't want the water. Plus, if you do have water, then it can make clouds and then it can rain and then that. Uh, so deserts are good for there being little rain, which means there's very few clouds typically.

• 6:09Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, you can actually see fainter stars that way. You know, the, this, that when the star gets blurred out a little bit, then what we call the surface brightness goes down. And so, so as long as you concentrate all of that starlight into a single point, your eye is going to be able to pick up fainter stars and further away.

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot about that. That's right. Because if you smear out the light, then it might not be bright enough to trigger your detection threshold, but concentrate it all into one spot and there it is. A pinprick of light. Now, in the United States, we have places that can be far away from cities. Where have you been? What are some places you've been?

• 6:49Matt O'Dowd?

  I mean, you know, I've seen some good stuff in New York also, but, you know.

• 6:53Chuck Nice?

  Not, not the city.

• 6:54Matt O'Dowd?

  Many, many, many, but a little bit blurry. But exactly as you had west, you know, the middle of the country. The northeast is good, but, you know, again, a bit of humidity, but, but, you know, those central states. Nevada is probably where I've done most of my stargazing.

• 7:11Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, really?

• 7:12Chuck Nice?

  Nevada?

• 7:13Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. Nevada, yeah, all places. Um, you, I mean, it's a, an amazing state. You've got cool cities, but pretty quick to get away from them, you know, hop in a car and there's desert.

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I get it. So what, what Nevada did was it took all the city lights and put them into just two cities.

• 7:32Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. Pretty, pretty much.

• 7:34Chuck Nice?

  So they, they centralized, they centralized all the city lights.

• 7:37Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. Whereas the northeast is just towns all the way up.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's sprawling, continual northeast corridor. Okay. So you put all of them in one place, then that leaves the rest of the state. Cause I was in Montana. I got a similar sense of that. You know, they call it big sky country, but what good is a big sky if it's cloudy? You know, it doesn't matter. So Montana's not in the desert latitudes, all right? And if you go down south, what's interesting is that between thirty and thirty-five degrees north latitude.

• 8:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is all the great deserts of the northern hemisphere. So you get the Mojave Desert, the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert.

• 8:18Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, and India would be a desert were it not for the monsoon. And India, you know, is right on those parallels, thirty to thirty-five degrees. So, so anyway, so if you, so if you go into the United States, away from civilization.

• 8:32Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you get desert, that pretty much localizes where you can do this, right, Matt?

• 8:37Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. I mean, it's the, it's the best way you could do it. Absolutely. Um, yeah, people. Do good astronomy everywhere because people are amazing. But, but you know, for me, Nevada, Black Rock Desert in Nevada is my favorite spot.

• 8:52Chuck Nice?

  In a way, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's kind of balances because, uh, we can see, uh, Las Vegas from space, but in the rest of the state, you can see space from there.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nevada, very clever.

• 9:07Chuck Nice?

  It's a perfect balance.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's like a, that's like a slogan or something. That's, that's going to be on a bumper sticker, Chuck.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So you get the benefit of the desert. So, and which means also clear skies. And so, so where did you observe? Precisely, Matt?

• 9:24Matt O'Dowd?

  So the Black Rock Desert, uh, which is a few hours out of Reno, um, is a, an alkali flat. So it's this huge, many mile wide alkali flat, ancient, ancient lake bed. Strange place, actually. It's, um, you know, this, this super basic, uh, uh, dust on the, uh, very flat. You can drive on this surface. Okay. Most of the year, you know, with your eyes closed, there's nothing for miles. Uh, don't do that, kids. And, and so when, when the dust isn't up in a, a storm, it is crystal clear. Um, so I, I've, I've been there a few times. So I've been there with a, a group, a group of colleagues who, who run what's

• 10:07Matt O'Dowd?

  called the Black Rock Observatory and they bring a big telescope, like a meter wide, uh, diameter mirror telescope. And so you can-

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's still portable. If they bring it, it's portable.

• 10:18Matt O'Dowd?

  It's marginally portable. Yeah.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Marginally portable.

• 10:22Matt O'Dowd?

  It is portable. Yeah.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 10:24Matt O'Dowd?

  It's a small van, but yes.

• 10:26Chuck Nice?

  So now let me just ask this as a city dweller myself. Um, when you're out there in the desert, is there a Ritz Carlton nearby?

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in case.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying, I mean, if I want to spend the night.

• 10:40Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, there's a five, there's a five star hotel right in the Black Rock. It's there, of course, you just got to know how to, you just got to know how to find it. Ask the locals.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you're on a call with two astrophysicists. It's not, you're not spending the night anywhere. You're spending the day.

• 10:57Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that's right, because the night is where the action is, baby.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The night is our day.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  We are indeed creatures of the night. Take that, take that, Dracula.

• 11:09Chuck Nice?

  We'll show you how to do it all night long. Oh, look, we just another bumper sticker. Astronomers do it all night long.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know, that's, that's an old one.

• 11:18Chuck Nice?

  Is that an old one?

• 11:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very old.

• 11:20Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very old.

• 11:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Matt, what were your favorite targets of the night sky?

• 11:25Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay, so, I mean, out there, you know, you can see some good deep sky objects. And, you know, the, the nebulae are the most beautiful, if you can see them well. Okay, so the, the remnants of stars that have ended their lives and blown off their outer layers. And so everyone's seen these, these crazy configurations of colorful gas out there in space. And with a really good telescope.

• 11:50Matt O'Dowd?

  Those are gems, um, but, um, you know, the Andromeda Galaxy is a winner, I think, because it's so bright. You know, you can actually see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye at a good dark sky, dark sky sight. You know, it's, it's.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, plus, it's a northern hemisphere object.

• 12:11Matt O'Dowd?

  It's an added bonus. It's a, it's two and a half million light years away, but, you know, if you know how to look at it, which is just off where it actually is, you see, uh, this distant giant galaxy just right there.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're talking about averted vision.

• 12:26Matt O'Dowd?

  Averted vision, exactly, right. Staring right at it, it sort of fades out. Curious effect. The one, the one thing that you can't go past, that if you want to wow the locals, is Saturn. Showing people Saturn. The most mystical experience for someone who hasn't experienced, you know, all of this stuff previously.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Matt, what impresses me is you can show it to them through a telescope and it's nowhere near as richly displayed as a Hubble photo they might see online.

• 12:55Matt O'Dowd?

  Right.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yet this still blows their mind.

• 12:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because you can, you can see the rings.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you can see it in a photo. I'm just, I'm just saying.

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  There's something about, I mean, I, I, I know exactly what Matt's talking about.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the moment.

• 13:08Chuck Nice?

  Because the two, the first two things I ever saw through a telescope, the first of course was the moon. Okay. And you get to see, and you're like, oh my God, like it's, I'm right there. I'm on the moon. I can't believe I'm on the moon. And the second was Saturn. And even though, um, when you look at like Cassini and these images, right, where you just see these.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Cassini space probe to Saturn.

• 13:29Chuck Nice?

  Thank you. Uh, and you see like how detailed the rings are and you can like, and they, they almost look like this little ballet of debris going around the planet. But you can't see it like that through a telescope, but you, you know, it's, it's looks like bright, kind of blown out version of that Cassini image. But it's so detailed in that it's actually so different with the rings and you can make it out. And it's like the only thing that you know in the sky. Like, you know what I mean? Like you've never looked up in the sky before, you know Saturn has rings and then you're seeing it. Something about that is something about.

• 14:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's confirming evidence.

• 14:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, there it is.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Confirmatory evidence.

• 14:12Chuck Nice?

  It's confirmatory evidence. It's like, oh my God, I'm really looking out into space.

• 14:17Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah. Somehow all of those Cassini movies or Hubble photos, like, you know, we're so spoiled on, you know, amazing CGI these days that part of us maybe doesn't believe that it's real. But when the photons come from Saturn directly through the telescope and hit you in the eye, then there's no denying.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause they, your photons.

• 14:38Matt O'Dowd?

  There's immediate sense of the size of the universe.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, I hear that Nevada has a dark sky sanctuary. What is that?

• 14:45Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, dark sky sanctuary is a, um, a region where there's regulation about the types of lights that can be within a certain region. Um, you know, so it's, it's, it's possible to do lighting in a way that doesn't destroy the sky. You know, you don't have to shine all your light straight up. You don't have to illuminate all of your buildings.

• 15:08Chuck Nice?

  How about you shine them down?

• 15:10Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, down.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're down.

• 15:11Chuck Nice?

  I'm down.

• 15:11Matt O'Dowd?

  That's where you need it.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you're in an airplane and you're flying over a city and you can see a street light, somebody's paying to send light to your eyeball in the airplane.

• 15:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 15:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what's, what do you, you know, it looks bleak. Everything I've read about the future of dark skies.

• 15:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it seems like these are, these are cherished places. Few places left on earth.

• 15:35Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, so the expansion of the cities, more and more towns in between cities until you have the whole country, maybe the world being the northeast corridor. Uh, and there are some spots that presumably will never become cities. You know, there are those spots in Nevada, I doubt that Black Rock is it will become a city. But these places become more and more distant to most people. And so fewer and fewer people, you know, have access. And kids growing up are less and less likely to see more than a hundred stars in the sky.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So people are growing up without any relationship to the night sky. They don't even know to look up and be curious about it. I, I think we will lose something deeply. If that's the world, that's the next generation that's going to lead the world. They'll have no sense of the, the paths of curiosity that led us into the universe.

• 16:28Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know how important it was or how lucky we are that we have a transparent atmosphere. I mean, you know, obviously it's good that it's transparent that we, that we can see, but it's transparent all the way to space. We can imagine situations where you have this permanent cloud cover at some level and we wouldn't even know that the universe existed beyond.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt, I think about that all the time.

• 16:50Matt O'Dowd?

  Oh, really?

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time. If we grew up on the surface of Venus, which has a very thick cloud cover. Now Venus doesn't happen to have a moon, but if it did, we would have, we would just look at the tides come in and out mysteriously and have no understanding of it. We have no idea that there was a night sky with stars and nebulae in the Andromeda Galaxy. There'd be no cosmology until someone ascended through the air and emerged on the top of the clouds. And imagine the first person to do that.

• 17:20Matt O'Dowd?

  But would we even get there? How instrumental was the night sky in sparking that curiosity that got us started inventing?

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, to pull you there.

• 17:29Chuck Nice?

  Curiosity, to fly, to fly in the first place, yeah.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so that's a very good point, Matt. I had not considered that the curiosity stimulators are looking to a place that you otherwise cannot reach and asking yourself, how can I, how will I ever reach it?

• 17:47Chuck Nice?

  Well, then again, somebody would have looked up and said, I wonder what's beyond those puffy things up there. I wonder what's behind that, that canopy.

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not everybody, but some, some do.

• 17:58Matt O'Dowd?

  It'd take it a bit longer, but.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, in the latest StarTalk book, we devote chapters and chapters to that kind of state of mind. You know, what is beyond, it's titled to infinity and beyond, the infinity is a moving target. It's like in the 1700s, if I say, go to the moon, say, that's not possible. So the moon is at infinity to you for all your, for all you know, right? You can't ever get there. Well, plus you need new laws of physics and this mythical magical substance called rocket fuel and a rocket on top of that, then you can get to the moon. But that's completely mythical at that stage. So, yeah, I'm intrigued by this. So Matt, just describe your emotions when you're out under the night sky now as a professional

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  astrophysicist. If you were not an amateur astronomer, but now as a professional astrophysicist, what emotions come over you?

• 18:50Matt O'Dowd?

  You know, some people have asked whether understanding the universe too well takes away the magic. The opposite.

• 19:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:01Matt O'Dowd?

  Expands and. Amplifies all of the experience. So I now, now when I go out under the night sky, I mean, my first impulse is the same child like, holy crap, look at all those stars. But now I have, I guess, the apparatus to be able to imagine this vast three dimensional universe and the distance between the stars and me on this spinning orb of rock and all this stuff. So I can, I can sort of hold that model to the stars. And yeah, it's a good man. It's a good trip.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I still well up when I, when I go to mountain tops and I look up to the night sky. If I'm alone and just the eerie silence of just me, the mountainside and the night sky. Well, Matt, it's been a delight to have you. You don't come on often enough. And remind me what kind of stuff you do on PBS's space time?

• 20:00Matt O'Dowd?

  Oh, sure. Yeah. I mean, we do astrophysics, astronomy and, and physics. And we go, we go pretty hard in a lot of areas. You know, we're doing a bunch of quantum mechanics episodes right now. So if there's anything weird.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a real learning experience.

• 20:18Matt O'Dowd?

  Yeah, people learn.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 20:20Matt O'Dowd?

  Come and check it out.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it. Okay. All right. We'll do that. Chuck, our next guest is a National Geographic explorer, astrophotographer and science photojournalist. Back to Freshy coming up.

• 20:40Chuck Nice?

  This episode is brought to you by travelnevada.com. With this week's partial eclipse and the total eclipse happening in early 2024, we're quickly reminded of how important it is to get outside and look up. But if you're in a big city like I am, you know that it's near impossible to fully appreciate all that the night sky has to offer. So as home to more of the last true dark skies than anywhere in the lower 48 states, we want to encourage you to consider Nevada when booking your next cosmic adventure. Want to go on a guided tour through the stars led by Dark Sky? Rangers journey to the Great Basin and book a spot on the Star Train. As one of seventeen international dark sky sanctuaries worldwide, you can also visit the massacre rim wilderness study area.

• 21:25Chuck Nice?

  Looking to put that telescope of yours to good use? Check out the constellations from the Tonopah Stargazing Park. And a quick pro tip from us, these places are remote. So if you're traveling there, be sure to bring a map because your cell phone might not work. Yes, a physical map. Remember those things? As always, we here at StarTalk encourage you to keep looking up and get out there by visiting travlenevada.com. That's travlenevada.com for your next night sky adventure.

• 22:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist with my co-host Chuck. Nice, Chuck. Yes, Neil. What's happening? We've got with us, right in the house. Yeah. Babak Tafreshi. No, Babak, Babak Tafreshi. Did I say that right? Babak.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  Perfect, perfect.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see I did it right. So there. You are an astrophotographer, a space photo journalist, which sounds like you go to space to get pictures, but that's probably not what it is. But that's what it sounds like. Cosmo paparazzi, man. Cosmo paparazzi. Yeah, let's get a close up on that lander, right? So. Avis Atari over here, over here, Avis Atari.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smile. What are you wearing? Who are you wearing?

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're National Geographic Explorer. This is a highly privileged coveted designation that goes to people who are scattered around the world doing their thing in the National Geographic family of people bringing the universe to the rest of us. You're also an amateur astronomer and we're going to find out why that is a badge of honor and not a denigration. You studied physics in school, love that, and you're an advocate for night skies, dark skies. And that's another good thing. And plus, you're a founder of the World at Night Initiative. We'll get into that when we get back to that.

• 23:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, let's, let's, let's, tell me what you're about, Babak. What, what, what drives you? What, how did it all begin?

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  And what's your relationship with your mother? Let's get into this very deeply.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It really begins.

• 24:01Chuck Nice?

  Let's really get into it.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Well, I'm originally from Iran, from Tehran. I'm Iranian-American science journalist and photographer. My interest astronomy started with the first look at the moon, like many others. At the age of 13, I borrowed this telescope on top of a roof in apartment in Tehran, which is highly light polluted. I had a look at the moon and I couldn't believe my eyes. You know, it was much more than the map I had in my hand. All the craters, mountains, and this was just a tiny telescope, two inch. You know, oh, I can remember that scene is still second by second. It's almost like being the Apollo orbiter going around the moon because I had no tracking with the telescope.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  So it was with the earth rotation, the scene was moving across, across the view. And I thought, you know, that would be cool to capture it on film. So that was the next night, which failed.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, you said something that I want to make sure our audience fully understands. You have a telescope that's not plugged in. It just points in one direction and the moon is in the frame. But because earth is rotating, that what's in the frame is passing by. And the magnification of the telescope is such that you're basically observing the rotation of the earth as the sky goes by your field.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Anytime I look through a telescope, that happens. Anytime you even take a picture of the sky, even with your phone, if you go beyond 30 seconds, you start to see stars are not pinpoint anymore or little trails. This is a fact for the earth rotation. I mean, it's a very easy evidence of how earth is rotating and how the sky is turning above us.

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  That sounds kind of annoying, like it would ruin every picture.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  That's very true. That's very true. That's why we are limited with shorter exposures, less than thirty seconds unless you use a device that tracks with Earth's rotation, that can freeze Earth's rotation, we call it the star tracker, or use a motor attached to your telescope that can track the stars. I didn't have that, that tiny telescope. So that's why the view was moving and it felt like being in an orbit around the moon. So later on, I became an editor at Astronomy Magazine of Iran. I started a TV program for about ten years. We had a weekly TV program on space and astronomy.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  I was highly inspired by Neil, in fact. I emailed you back in nineties, if you can remember, I'm not sure.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh. Did I reply?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  You did. You did, in fact.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's good.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. If you didn't, this would be very awkward right now.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be an awkward moment completely. But I do reply to all emails eventually.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eventually is the...

• 26:56Speaker 03

  So yes, that was very inspiring to me. And later, I started a program called The Board at Night in 2007. I was still based in Iran. And since the program became more and more global with exhibitions here and there, I had to leave Iran because it was not possible with all the limitations from the government and also the sanctions and internet filtration. So me and my wife decided to leave Germany and later on to the US. I became a National Geographic photographer in 2012 and recently much more involved with Accio across the platform, society and other parts of the platform of National Geographic.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to remind people in this moment, the National Geographic platform is huge. We just published our third book in collaboration with National Geographic Books, just came out. And so... Natu does a lot of different things for this world or for our appreciation of the world. So I guess we're in the family with you as well. So I just had to slip that in there.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in 2007, when The World at Night started, I shifted from science journalism more into photography. But still in today photography, I try to bring in my science journalism passion into my visual storytelling. So every image to me has a title, has a subtitle and all the elements of an article. Recently, I started to work on a project for National Geographic Society called Life at Night, which brings the attention more to the ground, still at nighttime, and how animals are in relationship with natural night environment. How dark skies is important not only to stargazers like us, but also to billions of animals who are nocturnal.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  And how light pollution is impacting that relationship.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody gives them a thought at all.

• 28:51Chuck Nice?

  Nobody does. You know, you look at casinos and casinos are extremely bright beyond what they should be. And you'll find that the indigenous bird population, wherever there are casinos, is totally screwed up. It's because the birds think it's daytime 24 hours a day.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, more than 18% of birds in North America which are migratory, they travel at night. They fly at night because it's safer to fly at night. There is no predator and it's also much more energy efficient without the heat. And because of night flying, they use stars for celestial navigation, as well as earth magnetic field and the landmarks. But light pollution is a new source of attraction to them and completely disrupt their navigation system. So they come down to the source of light and most of them unfortunately die either by losing the time, either impacting or getting lost in the cities.

• 29:52Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so Chuck, when you said casinos, you mean the illumination of the casino on the exterior?

• 29:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you said it, right, okay.

• 30:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, because you'll often find casinos in an isolated place. You know, so think about it, you know.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like all of Las Vegas, right?

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, it's in a desert or Atlantic City. It's on the beach or, you know.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Las Vegas is visible from Saturn.

• 30:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right, yeah, exactly. So, you know, but.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, we did the project, in fact, about the light of Los Angeles and Las Vegas and the darkest sky of Death Valley, um, within the border of Nevada and California, which is a dark sky place. It's designated International Dark Sky Park. And Las Vegas was boldly visible, almost like sunrise from 90 miles away. Then we went to 150 miles away, was still visible. I even have record from 220 miles away, and there is still a glow.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is well beyond the distance to your horizon. So it's not a matter of sightlines to the lights, right? It's the glow in the air that it puts up that you can still see. Because your horizon is what, maybe 20 miles away from wherever?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  The actual horizon, maybe 30 miles. Yes, that's the actual horizon.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  There's some refraction impact too. Because of the refraction, we see a further away horizon. But that's certainly called the sky glow. It's a, it's a reflection of light from dust, from aerosol, from clouds in the sky. And the lower the place is, the more dusty it is, the more sky blue it generates.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, right. And which makes mountain tops a good target.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. Even close to the cities, it's very interesting. When you look at the light pollution maps, looking for dark sky places near you, the elevation is not there. That factor is not visible in the light pollution maps. And if you, for example, give you an example in Los Angeles, if you go to Mount Wilson Observatory, which is within the edge of the Los Angeles, you can see the Milky Way from Los Angeles with all that light, fair, barely visible, but it's still, you can see the Milky Way, it's just like an impossible. Dream to see, um, you know, hundred eighty degrees of light of Los Angeles and the Milky Way is visible because it's six thousand feet above the city.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, I just have to add that Mount Wilson is where Edwin Hubble discovered that galaxies are whole other, that fuzzy objects in the night sky are other galaxies, and he discovered the expanding universe, all of that in the nineteen twenties. So we are in the centennial celebration of these discoveries. Not only that, quantum physics was formulated in the nineteen twenties as well. All at Mount Wilson Observatory. So that's pretty cool.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, in fact, Neil, a hundred years, the hundred years anniversary of discovery of expansion of universe, it's coming in October.

• 32:53Chuck Nice?

  Hmm, okay. I'm gonna put that on my calendar.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Break out, break out some champagne. So you said that Death Valley in Nevada on the border of California was a dark skies site. Is that like a sanctuary? Or what does it mean to be a dark skies site?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Uh, I work in partnership sometimes with a nonprofit called the International Dark Sky Association, and our darkest sky.org is where they put all the resources they have. And they have designated more than two hundred sites worldwide in more than twenty countries, in fact. Uh, one of them is in Nevada, and these places are, um, dark enough to see the Milky Way. Some of them are known as sanctuaries, as you mentioned. These are the top level, the darkest, some of the best observatories in the world, for example, um, Mauna Kea or observatories in Chile. There are in such places where the Milky Way still looks like

• 33:56Speaker 03

  from the dawn of humankind, you can see it without any impact of light pollution. We still have those places. Then comes the darkest sky parks. There's some light glows on the horizon, but it's still, it's beautiful, like many of the southwest parks. Is included in the darkest sky part designation. We are also darkest sky communities where people are trying to change lights to make the area more sky friendly, less light polluted. And these are different designations. And there's also another program by UNESCO which has starlight reserves.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be surprised if UNESCO didn't get a get a part of its interest in there because that's their scope is open from just cultural sites to places that are we have a special relationship with nature and the world itself. I have a fast International Dark Sky Association story where they got gangsta on me. Chuck, did ever tell you that?

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. When we opened the Rose Center for Earth and Space in the year 2000 in the middle of Manhattan, Manhattan's Upper West Side, we had these tiny little pen lights in the in the plaza area before you enter the building. And these tiny little 10 watt lights were pointing upwards. And I got a letter in the mail from the Dark Sky Association that said, you need to be an example for the rest of them and not have upward pointing lights. These were tiny little pen lights in the pavement. And I thought that was gangsta. In Manhattan, right? In Manhattan. Oh, my gosh.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to simultaneously love him and say, what the are you doing?

• 35:42Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say that. It's a little nitpicky.

• 35:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little nitpicky.

• 35:45Chuck Nice?

  A little nitpicky, you know?

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I but I definitely appreciated their sentiment. So, by back, you describe the World Night Initiative as combining art and culture. You mentioned nocturnal animals, but in what ways art and culture mixed in with this?

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Well, if you look at the images we take of the night sky, they're not necessarily scientific. We have two kinds of astrophotography. One made with telescopes, deep sky photography in general it's called. And the other one is more called night escape photography, which includes earth and sky, they're mainly wide angle. In a wide angle image that resemble the field of view of human eye, you are not going to discover a galaxy. You're not going to discover a new comet. You're aiming for art and you're aiming for science communication. That's where the art of astrophotography can be a platform to tell people about the importance of night sky, principles of practical astronomy and also the issue of light.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're talking about these pictures where someone is standing there with their arms up. You see the Milky Way in the background. There's a mountain scape and trees. And it's just a beautiful photo that includes the night sky. That's what you're talking about.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  That's right. Sometimes there's a story involved. I try to include four factors in my photography and highly recommend to any viewer who's going to be an astrophotographer to have this in mind. Art, technique, these are very obvious for photography as a basis. Then comes the moment. Could be meteor, comet, a wild animal at night and a story. When these four come together, you have an image that can create an impact, can keep in the memory of somebody who is viewing it. The story is the difficult part.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. I love that. This is, this is, this is time honored process, right? This is, oh my gosh. Because, because when you say it's just a picture of a cosmic object, I can tell the story of the cosmic object, but I can't bring it back to you. I can't make it real. I can't make a story that you then share with your next of kin, right? So this, how important this is through the history of civilization? Oh my gosh.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's very important to make it realistic. I like to emphasize on that too, because today astrophotography could be generally based on composite images, stacking different exposures and putting them together in Photoshop. But it's important to... To consider that the elements of the sky are like the elements of the natural world. You cannot copy a mountain on top of a lake where it doesn't exist unless it's for an artistic reason, not in documentary photography. And for the same reason, you cannot copy the moon from another part of the sky to wherever you like. This is like, to me, it's like cheetah on top of an elephant.

• 38:47Chuck Nice?

  It's a lie is what it is at that point. You're just lying.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People do that all the time. People, especially the moon.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know it because they don't, typically when they do that, they don't know that people in the know, know what the orientation of the moon needs to be to the horizon, depending on your latitude on Earth. And they'll just slap a moon there. Sometimes it's upside down, sometimes it's backwards. Sometimes the cues where you can just get it wrong. And I'll call them out. I'll be up in their face when I say.

• 39:18Chuck Nice?

  They don't, they don't do it around Neil. Okay, let's be honest. Let's, come on. Let me, let's be, let me tell you something. This dude went on the Today Show, was just like, hey, you know that globe thing you got going in the beginning? It's wrong. It's totally wrong.

• 39:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, The Daily Show. That was The Daily Show.

• 39:33Chuck Nice?

  The Daily Show, that's what it was.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was spinning backwards. It was spinning backwards. Yeah.

• 39:37Chuck Nice?

  But that was, that was the beginning of the interview.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop. So I love your message, one people, one sky. And that's very hopeful, very peace-oriented thought there.

• 39:51Chuck Nice?

  So how do we get people, before we continue, to get out and do more, to look up? I mean, Neil's always saying, keep look, keep looking up. How about the people who aren't looking up at all? They're not keep looking up? How do they start looking up?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  I think a trip to a national park or a state park in a dark sky place is the best way to do this. Because many of the national parks in the US and Canada are dark sky designated locations, especially in southwest US. Some of my favorites, for example, in Arizona and Nevada border is the western end of Grand Canyon. Or the Great Basin National Park. It's at high altitude in Nevada and it's also very dark. There are plenty of dark sky locations in that area. All the five major national parks in Utah are dark sky designated or going to be soon. In northwestern Nevada, we have the Black Rock Desert, another dark sky place.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Even very close to Las Vegas, on the way to BT, on the way to Death Valley, there's a dark sky area. Another place I have photographed many times is Cathedral Gorge, which is inside Nevada on the border of Utah. And it's just fascinating, um, rock formations with dark sky above.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a map they can go to online that identifies these dark spots?

• 41:15Speaker 03

  There are two ways to do that. One is light pollution map dot info. Uh, that's a website and there is also a layer for Google Earth. Um, a university study provided this layer of, uh, known as the, um, the map, the atlas of artificial sky glow. Um, and this you can add it to your Google Earth and then you can zoom in and see another place. Uh, another website is blue-marble.de. It's a German enthusiast who includes all these satellite images from every year. Uh, you can look at Earth at night and find dark sky places near you. But do not forget that elevation is not there. So if you, even if you're in a bright area, but you find an elevated side,

• 42:00Speaker 03

  which is at least 4,000, 5,000 feet above sea level. Then you start to see dark sky even within the cities.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. And right now you are speaking to us from Iceland. What are you doing there today?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  From Reykjavik, Iceland, this was my last day after two weeks of a photo workshop, capturing the Northern Lights and the Milky Way with a group coming from all around the country. I do this, um, all around the world. I do this twice a year in March and September, known as a real photo.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. So people can actually hang out with you and learn how to do what you're doing is, oh, look at that. My invitation might still be in my inbox, I'm guessing.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Anytime Neil.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me check. Let me check my inbox if I've ever been invited on this.

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you made a career of this. This is a brilliant, important and envious career path that you've made for yourself here. Congratulations on that.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And keep that going. All right. And Bob Back, thanks again for being our guest on StarTalk. All right.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Unless.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got next up Bradley Mills. Bradley Mills, you are Nevada Park Ranger, our very first Park Ranger on StarTalk. Welcome.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys are all cool with your outfits and you got your hat. You got that Park Ranger, that Smokey Bear hat.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It's an important part of the uniform.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you are the lead astronomy ranger and I'm so delighted to even know that such a person exists. As a Park Ranger, leading the astronomy effort, what are your tasks?

• 43:58Speaker 04

  Well, Great Basin National Park, where I work, we have one of the most extensive astronomy program kind of sets of probably any national park in the nation. So I just get to lead essentially how we run it all and oversee. I've got a seasonal staff of about five Park Rangers who get to focus solely on astronomy every single year. So I get to work doing that, which is just an absolute delight.

• 44:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me just back up just for a moment. This park is a national park in Nevada. It's not a state park in Nevada, correct?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  That's correct. We're the only national park entirely within Nevada. So there are some other smaller national park units, but we're the only one that has, you know, got that full special name.

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  And where exactly are you? Because I'm telling you right now, all of this talk about Nevada and the dark skies is giving me a reason to go to Nevada because I've only been to Las Vegas.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does not have dark skies.

• 44:54Chuck Nice?

  It does not.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Absolutely not.

• 44:56Chuck Nice?

  And it reminds me of work. So I would love another reason to go to Nevada. How close are you to Las Vegas? Or how easy are you to get to, I should say?

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Well, we're one of the more difficult places to reach. Uh, there's no public transportation. There's only a couple highways that even come anywhere near us. Uh, so we're about five hours north of Las Vegas. And we are, I mean, way on the middle of nowhere. And that's, that's the benefit. Because if we were anywhere, anywhere near Vegas, it's the brightest spot on earth.

• 45:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  So we gotta get far, far away. So we're luckily about five hours north. It's a, it's a.

• 45:29Chuck Nice?

  Brad Bradley, if you don't want me to come, just say, don't come. You don't have to.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  No, we love it. We're just, we're one of the least visited. It's so hard for people to get out here, you know? We get 150,000 people a year. Let's do it.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you manage the Great Basin Observatory. What is that? Because just to be clear, when geologists use the word observatory, this, it's just a place where they go stand and look around, right? So when an astronomer says observatory, we got real hardware there to connect you to the universe typically. So which kind of observatory is this?

• 46:06Chuck Nice?

  I just love that you're dissing geologists.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't call it observatory. Just stand there looking at an escarpment. That's not an observatory. That's just a, that's, that's a scenic, uh, what do you call it? A scenic overlook.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Well, so luckily, I am not the one fully in charge of the Great Basin Observatory. We've got, it was built by our, by the Great Basin National Park Foundation entirely from donated funds, which is incredible. But it's a proper research observatory. It's got the dome, it's got a 70-centimeter telescope. It is a, it's the real deal. I think it's, might even be one of the largest in Nevada. I could only find information on one other research-grade observatory in the state. So, we're, we're pretty special having that out here. And it's, it's a lot of fun.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what's the, what's the elevation of the Great Basin Observatory?

• 46:59Speaker 04

  So, the observatory is right around 68, 6900 feet.

• 47:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 47:04Speaker 04

  So, it's, yeah, it's high up. Yeah, our park starts at like, pretty much no lower than 6,000. It goes all the way up to the highest, well, second highest point in Nevada at Wheeler Peak at 13,063 feet. So, it's-

• 47:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what, at what point do you hallucinate? From lack of oxygen?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  You, we have people suffering from altitude sickness even this low, so I'm sure that's, it doesn't take you, you know, to get that high to have that happen.

• 47:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, my favorite thing to observe is what happens to unopened bags of potato chips that you bring to high altitude. They get really, really puffy.

• 47:39Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just, I love these secondary experiments you can do at, at high altitude. So, what is this? We heard, hear about a Star Train. What is that?

• 47:49Speaker 04

  So, the Nevada Northern Railway is a historic railway line that operates out of Ely, Nevada. And they run a train, have been running this train for 10 years in partnership with the park, that goes from Ely, Nevada, about 15, 20 miles north of town and to a telescope flats, where we've got telescopes set up and let people kind of hop off the train. They get to look through telescopes. We do ranger programs and trivia and astronomy, just fun things, you know, give out prizes and stuff on the train. And we get to ride back in the middle of the night.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, this, doesn't this sound like a setup for one of the scenes in Westworld? Where you take some, some little-

• 48:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, some little train that you go out into the desert and all of a sudden, right, exactly.

• 48:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a saloon there and a gunfighter-

• 48:38Chuck Nice?

  And then all of a sudden, Ed Harris shows up and you're just like, wait a minute, wait a minute.

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It does kinda sound like that. So uh

• 48:49Speaker 04

  It is, it is.

• 48:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I interrupted. The train goes from where to where?

• 48:52Speaker 04

  Uh, so it goes from Eagle Nevada up the Steptoe Valley. So it actually doesn't come into the park, but it's uh, it's still in the Great Basin, which is about the size of Nevada. So it's a very similar environment and we still get some excellent, excellent night skies out there.

• 49:06Chuck Nice?

  So you said you need, that you have a telescope set up. What do I need to bring? Here I am, a person. I'm just like, okay, why not? Let's go stargazing. I'll give it a try. What do I need to bring?

• 49:18Speaker 04

  If you're coming to the park and one of our programs, just yourself and a, a sense of enthusiasm. That's all you need. Cause we've got all the other equipment. We've got all the knowledge and we'd love to share it. So it makes it really easy for, for people to come and experience the night sky. Uh, yeah. The amount of times I have people who have come out here, never seeing the Milky Way, sometimes never even seeing more than five, six stars in the sky and then get to come here.

• 49:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Growing up, yes. I count me among those.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  No, me too. I, I grew up in San Diego County and uh, you know, I counted maybe 10 stars in a planet every once in a while. And then come out here and every night in the summer, even sometimes when there's a lot of moon, you get to see the Milky Way. It's, it's incredible. It's life changing.

• 50:01Chuck Nice?

  Do you ever, do you ever play um, audio of Neil deGrasse Tyson? So that people feel like they're looking up at a planetarium?

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the audio, and now?

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Well, we let them know we've poked lots of holes, you know, so that's why there's so many stars.

• 50:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. It's just a dome. It's just a dome. So uh, generally the best observing sites in the world are in deserts. So just to remind me of my geography, is all of Nevada count as a desert?

• 50:33Speaker 04

  Essentially, uh, big, big, big sections of it. So we're in the Great Basin Desert out here. And so, you know, we get very, very little annual rainfall. We are incredibly high up. So we got the high elevation, you know, we're high desert, dry. It really, really adds to making this such an excellent place for, for stargazing.

• 50:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fewer air molecules are in the air to disrupt the, the, the, the starlight and fewer clouds and less rain. So everything works.

• 51:01Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 51:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're pretty much guaranteed a clear night anytime you schedule this, isn't that right?

• 51:06Speaker 04

  No, not necessarily. We have a pretty intense monsoon season through, through July and August. And we get, get programs rained out every once in a while. But if it's just cloudy, we can always find something in the clouds. It's, it's still dark enough here that even if you only have, you know, that much in the sky, you can still find, you know, a nebula or a galaxy or something in there to be able to show people.

• 51:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. When you say cloudy, you don't mean overcast. You mean clouds in the sky? And you look in between clouds?

• 51:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

• 51:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so do they, how do you, can you quantify how dark the sky is? I mean, is there ways to know?

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 51:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who qualifies and who doesn't?

• 51:43Speaker 04

  So, so we measure luminance here using, I actually even grabbed it. Uh, we have a little sky quality meter that we go around, uh, once a month and.

• 51:51Chuck Nice?

  It's like a, like a camera light meter.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Pretty much. We point it at the sky and.

• 51:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's a tricorder. It's like, it's a sky tricorder.

• 51:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I should have said that.

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I got you. I beat you to it. Hold it up to the sky and go.

• 52:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So. She's dead, Jim. Okay. It's cloudy, Jim.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, you know, I just pointed in my office. It just said 8.5, which means it's bright in daytime. But it can go up to 22 is, is where we, we want to kind of hang out at. And Great Basin's right around like 21.6, 21.8, which means we have some of the darkest skies that are, are measured in this country.

• 52:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the bigger the number, the darker the sky?

• 52:29Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 52:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in case that was not clear.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yes.

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. So what kind of, uh, when we think of national parks and national forests, for example, there's a maintenance budget for it, you know, for, for hiking paths perhaps, or, or fire management tasks that they go through for.

• 52:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the astronomy club, what kind of management is necessary there other than maybe just the upkeep of the telescope?

• 52:58Speaker 04

  That's a big part of it is just maintaining our equipment. But I get a new, I like to kind of say, I get a fresh crop of Rangers every year. So they, we've got some people that return and otherwise I've got new folks who, we've got to train up and got to get them learning more about the sky if they're still, you know, just kind of feeling the amateur level and one gets to that point where they can really, really teach people. But otherwise, it's pretty simple and it's just managing, just managing the people and we also get a lot of volunteers here throughout the year for some of our big festivals and other things that we do. So there's a lot of, lot of work put into that as well.

• 53:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're the guy wearing the badge.

• 53:33Chuck Nice?

  If you're an amateur astronomer, it's a really great thing to get out to you because you can get paid for being an amateur astronomer.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right.

• 53:45Chuck Nice?

  Would that make you a professional astronomer?

• 53:47Speaker 04

  I guess so.

• 53:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All I'm saying is you got, you got a nice shiny badge there. I'm telling you, if I came out there, I would say, I don't need no stinking badges. We don't need those. I don't need no stinking badges. I know the sky. Very nice. So do you need to go through like brush up classes or something, you know, to just stay on top of the constellations and the latest discoveries that you might then add to the stuff you point out? Like how do you stay current?

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Well, so it's just a lot of just doing research and, you know, when you have downtime or if a program gets canceled, that means we get to spend more time learning. So we read a lot of publications. We're always keeping an eye on what's going to be above us in the sky that night, obviously, you know, so we can point out things like cool space missions that might be happening. We got to see some rocket boosters recently. We were just even talking to people about the Osiris mission that just landed. So it's been a, we get a lot of very, very cool things that happen near us that are very visible that you wouldn't really necessarily be able to see if you were not in a sky like ours.

• 54:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. I'm very glad to hear that because. Yeah, the universe is not just the stars as they're laid out for us on Earth. There's this whole frontier of research unfolding that does make headlines, right? It's not even obscure. You know, with the Osiris Rex mission, it was a piece of an asteroid brought back to Earth, landing in an adjacent state, right? Right there in Utah. So, okay, well, this is a delight to meet you, Bradley. And I'm even more delighted to know that someone such as you exists in this country or even in the world.

• 55:28Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 55:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's tasked with bringing the night sky to the public and preserving the night sky in the interest of civilization. Nah, there's no for us yet. Yeah, I think so.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's amazing.

• 55:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Bradley, give us a parting sentence to take us out.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  If you ever get the chance, come out to Nevada, broaden your horizons, see the night skies as it naturally should be.

• 55:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I'll summarize that and say, keep looking up.

• 55:55Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 55:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're out of here. Thanks, Bradley.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you both so much.

• 56:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always good to have you, Chuck. Always a pleasure. All right, this has been a stargazing edition of StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.