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The town of Grand Lake is taking steps toward becoming an official Dark Sky community. If certified, they would join 15 other parks and communities across Colorado designated as official Dark Sky places. On In The NoCo, we learn why more places are making efforts to protect the night sky.

The town of Grand Lake is taking steps toward becoming an official Dark Sky community. If certified, they would join 15 other parks and communities across Colorado designated as official Dark Sky places. On In The NoCo, we learn why a growing number of Colorado towns are prioritizing the night sky.

In annual reports sent to Dark Sky International, Utah’s national and state parks list light pollution from development and tourism as the main threat to maintaining their certification.

Parts of the Midwest and northeast will be seeing large crowds this weekend in preparation for Monday's total solar eclipse. On In the NoCo, we hear from a historian who wrote about an event in 1878 that forever changed the face of eclipse tourism - right here in Colorado.

The eclipse will take place around 10:30 a.m. Mountain Time, and mainly go over Nevada, Utah and New Mexico. It will also touch the Southwest corners of Colorado and Idaho.

People often love the night sky in our region. There’s less light pollution and you can see more stars. That is, until wildfire season. The smoke from those fires filters starlight and sometimes blots it out completely. That could mean fewer stargazing tourists venture into our region to take in a nighttime view of the galaxy.

For the next week, Colorado’s night skies will be full of shooting stars. Despite the name, they aren’t actually stars — they’re space debris, and they’re part of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Colorado is a global leader in preserving dark night skies. This year alone, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Mesa Verde National Park and four mountain towns were recognized for their stargazing potential. While these remote locations are good at preserving their starry views, residents of the Front Range would have to help out the state's largest national park.

The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn will be visible this Monday night, when the two planets will appear closest together in the night sky. KUNC’s Rae Solomon spoke with Carla Johns, who teaches astronomy at Aims Community College and works at the Fiske planetarium in Boulder, about the event.

Mars, Earth and the sun have lined up, a celestial orientation known as opposition. This particular opposition occurs at a time when the orbit of Mars takes it closest to the sun.