A Postcard to the Cosmos: Recreating the Arecibo Signal

This week on Star Trails, we explore the messages written across the cosmos — from faint comets in our own skies to the coded signals we’ve sent into the void. Drew shares a quick report from his local astronomy club’s fall star party, where hopes of photographing Comet A6 Lemmon met the familiar mix of excitement, haze, and grilled hamburgers under imperfect skies.

Then we turn from backyard observing to deep-space communication with a hands-on look at the Arecibo Message — the radio transmission beamed from Earth in 1974 as humanity’s mathematical greeting to the stars. We’ll break down what that signal said, how it was constructed, and whether an alien civilization could ever decode its meaning. Along the way, Drew recreates the original 1,679-bit message