What makes a song feel like space? In this special bonus episode of Star Trails, we take a deep dive into the song "Space Oddity," not just as a piece of music, but as a story of distance, disconnection, and drift.

Released in 1969 at the height of the space race, Bowie’s breakout hit arrived alongside humanity’s first steps on the Moon. The BBC even used it during their coverage of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, a strange pairing for a song about an astronaut who never makes it home.

But the real story of Space Oddity goes deeper. Through subtle harmonic shifts, borrowed chords, and unconventional production techniques, the song itself begins to drift, mirroring the fate of its protagonist, Major Tom.

We’ll explore: How the song quietly abandons its musical “home,” why instruments like the Mellotron and Stylophone create a sense of distance, the role of stereo mixing, reverb, and tape-era studio tricks in shaping its sound, and how Bowie’s use of characters allows the story to resonate on a deeper level.

Along the way, we trace the song’s journey beyond Earth itself, including Chris Hadfield’s performance aboard the International Space Station.

More than 50 years after its release, Space Oddity remains a haunting reflection on what it means to leave home, and what happens when you don’t come back.

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This week we step inside one of astronomy’s most iconic spaces: the observatory.

Drew visits Melton Memorial Observatory and sits down with director Martin Bowers to explore what a nearly 100-year-old, urban observatory still offers today. From public viewing nights to hands-on learning, we look at how these classic domes continue to connect people with the night sky, even under city lights.

Then, we zoom out to the bigger picture.

From Mount Wilson Observatory and Palomar Observatory to Mauna Kea Observatories and Paranal Observatory, we trace how observatories evolved from simple telescopes into powerful instruments that reshaped our understanding of the universe.

All of it built on a simple idea: gathering light, photon by photon.

Plus, a quick look at what’s in the night sky for the week of April 5th.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Melton Memorial Observatory Website
• Melton Facebook Page

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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This week we leave the familiar planets behind and venture into the farthest reaches of our Solar System, into regions where the Sun’s influence begins to fade and the boundaries of our cosmic neighborhood grow uncertain.

We explore the Kuiper Belt, a vast disk of icy remnants left over from the formation of the planets, and travel even farther into the mysterious Oort Cloud, a distant, spherical halo of objects that may extend halfway to the nearest stars. Along the way, we uncover the discoveries that reshaped our understanding of the Solar System, from the first detection of Kuiper Belt objects to the controversial reclassification of Pluto after the discovery of Eris.

We also follow the journey of the Voyager spacecraft, now drifting through interstellar space yet still deep within the Sun’s extended domain, and examine the ongoing search for the elusive Planet Nine, a world that may exist only as a gravitational whisper in the darkness.

And then there are the visitors: interstellar objects like ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov, fragments from other star systems passing briefly through our own.

In this week’s night sky report, we look ahead to the April 1 Full Moon, known as the Pink Moon, and highlight what you can still observe under bright moonlight, including Jupiter, several star clusters, and a beautiful close pairing of the Moon and Regulus.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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The most intriguing places in our solar system might not be planets at all. This week we turn our attention to some of the most fascinating and unusual worlds in our solar system: its moons.

For most of human history, we assumed moons were quiet, lifeless companions like our own. But as spacecraft ventured deeper into the outer solar system, a very different picture emerged.

Some moons erupt with volcanoes. Some hide vast oceans beneath miles of ice. Some have weather, rivers, and lakes, made not of water, but methane. And a few of them may have the ingredients necessary for life.

We’ll explore these strange worlds, from Io and Europa to Titan and Enceladus, and take a closer look at what makes them so dynamic. Along the way, we’ll revisit Pluto and its surprisingly complex family of moons, and consider why the outer solar system is teeming with these objects while the inner planets remain mostly bare.

Finally, we’ll step outside for a guided tour of the night sky for the week of March 22–28, including a waxing crescent Moon, brilliant Venus in the evening sky, Jupiter and its Galilean moons, and the arrival of spring’s galaxy season. We'll also check in on our book discussion with a look at Chapters 8 and 9 in Nightwatch.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In 2006, a group of astronomers gathered in Prague and made a decision that shocked the world: Pluto was no longer a planet.

But the story of Pluto is far more complicated—and far more fascinating—than that single vote.

In this episode of Star Trails, we reopen the case. From Percival Lowell’s search for the mysterious “Planet X” to Clyde Tombaugh’s painstaking discovery using a blink comparator, we trace the strange history of the ninth planet. We’ll examine the discoveries that led to Pluto’s controversial demotion, meet the astronomers who helped redefine what a planet is, and follow NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it revealed Pluto to be a dynamic and surprisingly complex world.

Along the way we explore Pluto’s bizarre orbit, its giant moon Charon, its icy surface and hidden mysteries—and the poetic moment when the ashes of its discoverer finally returned to the distant world he found.

And later in the show, we step outside for a look at the night sky for the week of March 15–21, including dark skies near the new moon, the arrival of the vernal equinox, brilliant Jupiter in Gemini, and a few deep-sky treasures worth tracking down with your telescope.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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This week we leave the rocky inner planets behind and journey into the deep cold of the outer solar system. From the storm-wracked atmosphere of Jupiter to the ringed elegance of Saturn and the mysterious ice giants Uranus and Neptune, these distant worlds reveal how strange and varied our planetary neighborhood truly is.

Along the way we explore how the solar system formed, why the inner planets are rocky while the outer planets became giants of gas and ice, and why the distant ice giants remain some of the least explored worlds we know.

Later in the episode we share a personal observing report after attempting to spot a SpaceX rocket launch from hundreds of miles away, offer up tips on how you might see one yourself, and we'll walk through what’s visible in the night sky for the week of March 8–14.

We’ll also continue our NightWatch book club with Chapters 6 and 7, exploring the realities of visual astronomy and how patient observation reveals the subtle beauty of the deep sky.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Spaceflight Now website

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In this milestone 100th episode of Star Trails, we bring the cosmos back home.

After months of exploring distant stars, nebulae, and black holes, March begins with a tour of our own neighborhood: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, four rocky worlds born from the same protoplanetary disk 4.5 billion years ago, yet shaped into radically different outcomes.

We’ll visit Mercury, the tiny planet that helped confirm Einstein’s General Relativity and inspired the hunt for a phantom world called Vulcan. We’ll step into Venus, Earth’s “twin” turned runaway greenhouse furnace, and then we’ll zoom out on Earth itself as if we’re alien astronomers reading its oceans, oxygen, and technosignatures from afar. Finally, we’ll head to Mars, a planet that once hosted flowing water, may have been habitable long ago, and still tempts us with the unresolved question of past life.

After the break, I nerd out about my electric car and trace an unexpected history of EVs in space, from the lunar rovers parked on the Moon to a Tesla Roadster orbiting the Sun.

In the sky report, the week’s headline event is a total lunar eclipse: the Full Worm Moon turns coppery red in Earth’s shadow, the only total lunar eclipse of 2026 visible across much of North America. Plus: Jupiter shines in the evening sky, and Mercury and Venus linger low in twilight.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social

If you're enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

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In this episode, we wrap up our month-long series on stars by exploring their final acts.

Most stars don’t explode. They grow old. We’ll follow the Sun’s future as it swells into a red giant, sheds its outer layers, and becomes a dense white dwarf held up not by heat, but by quantum mechanics itself. Along the way, we’ll examine planetary nebulae like the Ring Nebula and the Dumbbell Nebula, and look at real red giants such as Betelgeuse and Aldebaran that foreshadow stellar endings.

Then we turn to the massive stars — the ones that collapse, detonate as supernovae, leave behind neutron stars and magnetars, or cross the final threshold into black holes. We’ll discuss how gravity overwhelms every known force, how black holes are categorized by size, and why even these seemingly eternal objects slowly evaporate over unimaginable timescales.

In the night sky report, we cover the waxing Moon, a six-planet evening “parade,” Jupiter shining high after sunset, and a beautiful lunar encounter with the Pleiades.

Connect with us on Bluesky @startrails.bsky.social or YouTube @TheStarTrailsPodcast.

If you’re enjoying the show, consider sharing it with a friend! Want to help? Buy us a coffee! Also, check out music made for Star Trails on our Bandcamp page!

Podcasting is better with RSS.com! If you’re planning to start your own podcast, use our RSS.com affiliate link for a discount, and to help support Star Trails.