Craig Childs

speaker

62 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Craig Childs’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Reconnecting with the night sky and reining in light pollution · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

Thanks for having me, Ira.

Well, I started in Las Vegas, on the Las Vegas strip with a bike loaded for 10 days of backcountry and a companion who was equally loaded up.

And we biked out of the city and headed for the darkest place we could find.

Well, we went due north out of Vegas into the Mojave Desert, to the Desert Wildlife Refuge, and just out on these rough roads for 200 miles to basically see how the night would change, what kind of sky we would get for nine sequential nights going into the desert.

Well, you know, a bike is the right pace.

If you're driving, you would get to where we're going too quickly.

And I wanted to see that transition.

I wanted to see each night become entirely different.

And walking would be too slow because I don't think I would have...

really seen that transition.

So biking was the right pace to get a different sky so that each night we're looking at a completely new experience and we're going across the new moon.

So we're missing any moon glow and we're seeing just the full clear night sky.

Well, it seems like everything I'm writing about has a night sky in it, that there is always some reference to stars, planets, because it's really half the experience of being in the world, and I'm outdoors most of the time.

So I've got this focus on the night, and...

I've lived in bright places and mostly in dark places, but I find that it's such a powerful experience to see a full set of stars that I wanted to know what it's like to go from brightest to darkest and how that transition affects you, how it affects your eyes, your body, your experience in general.

Yeah, you're looking at infinity, which, you know, during the day you're not.

During the day you're looking at sky and during the night you're looking at space.

Uh, where we ran out of energy, where we just, uh, I was, I was using, uh, what's called the Bortles scale, which is a nine level scale from nine being the brightest sky, which was Las Vegas trip to one being the darkest sky that you could, you could find.

Uh, and, and so each night it really was, uh,

We would bike into the dark and we would just finally go, okay, that's far enough.

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