A sweet thing about seeing the night sky here, at high altitude: There’s less atmosphere to mess up your view. In Nederland, at 8236 feet (8.236 kilofeet; we’ll use kft this week), we’re looking through only three-fourths of the air of sea-level people.

For smokers and vapers, that’s bad, because at 8 kft they only have as much blood oxygen as non-users at 12 kft. (Carbon monoxide from cigarettes and vaping pens displaces oxygen in the blood’s hemoglobin, starving body tissues of oxygen.) But for seeing the sky, that missing quarter of air translates to sharper, clearer, brighter sky views.

Our reduced atmosphere is a notable privilege, seeing as how 99 percent of all people on earth, including nearly all Americans, live well below our height. In fact, most Americans live below 1 kft, with over half of the population living within 50 miles of a shoreline.

A special effect we get at 8 kft is, our water boils at 195 Fahrenheit, as compared to 212 degrees at sea level. (Take it from me, I’ve measured it.) This is because boiling occurs when the vapor pressure of a liquid equals the pressure of the atmosphere above its surface. That equivalence is what boiling bubbles are, shuttling up and down between the atmosphere and the liquid. Lower atmospheric pressure above the liquid equals lower boiling temperature within the liquid.

Which is why I hit my forehead with the palm of my hand when I realized why some “hard boiled” eggs I had steamed according to sea level instructions were under-done: The steam temperature here is 17 degrees less than at sea level. Sealevel boiling or steaming for 15 minutes at 212 degrees translates to about 25 minutes up here, at 195 degrees.

By the way, Marco Polo noted seven centuries ago that when his caravan set a dinner fire at 12 to 15 kft, up in the Pamirs of the Himalayas, the flames were cool and the food didn’t cook. Reduced oxygen starves fires, reducing their heat output rate.

Similarly, wood-burning stoves (such as our family heats our home with) here in Nederland put out about 25 percent less heat per unit time than they would at sea level, because they’re gasping along on 25 percent less oxygen. On the upside, the wood lasts about 25 percent longer.

A pleasant thing about life at 8 kft, in a warming climate, is what’s called the adiabatic lapse rate. That’s the automatic reduction in atmospheric temperature as altitude increases. Due to that effect, our temperature up here in Nederland is consistently about 14 degrees lower than in Boulder. It’s not always exactly that difference, but I watch my car’s digital thermometer every time I go up and down the canyon, and generally that predicted shift is a good fit.

Since it’s 15 miles between the bottom of the canyon and Nederland, that equates to about one degree of temperature change for every mile you drive in the canyon. You don’t have to use your odometer to see how far you’ve come up or down—just watch your thermometer for the number of degrees of temperature shift, and that’s about how many miles you’ve driven.

One last item on that topic. No matter where you go on our planet, you’re never more than four miles from where temperatures are well below freezing. Why? Because even on the equator, if you go vertically up to 20 kft (four miles) altitude, the adiabatic shift makes the air perpetually sub-freezing.

A lesson I learned the hard way in an unheated military KC-135 aerial tanker that I once hitched a ride in, from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Flying an equatorial route to Singapore, it hadn’t occurred to me that shorts and a T-shirt might be inadequate in the aircraft’s unheated hold at 40 kft. Luckily, the navigator invited me into the heated cockpit to take star shots for him, saving my butt from being, literally, frozen off.

In August skies: The sun begins the month in Cancer, entering Leo on August 10. At mid-month, days and nights are 13.5 and 10.5 hours long, respectively.

The moon’s dates are: New August 4; First Quarter August 12; Full (Sturgeon or Corn Moon) August 19; Last Quarter August 26.

August Meteor Showers: The Perseids (parent Comet Swift-Tuttle) and kappa-Cygnids (parent possibly Asteroid 2001 MG1) peak on August 13 and 18. The famous Perseids are best seen shortly before dawn. The k-Cygnids peak around 11 p.m.

Best Sky Viewing Nights (Minimal Moon): August 1-11 and 26-31.

Sunset (Mid-Month): Deneb is high in the east; Vega is nearly overhead; and Altair is mid-sky in the northeast. Hercules with its striking M-13 globular cluster is overhead. Libra (twin bright stars Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi) is low in the southwest. Antares is due south in Scorpius.

Midnight (Mid-Month): The Teapot in Sagittarius, marking the center of the Milky Way, glows in the south-southwest. Scan its wonders with binoculars or a telescope.

Sunrise (Mid-Month): The Gemini twins are low in the east. Our nearest neighbor galaxy, M-31 Andromeda, gives great binocular viewing directly overhead.

Mercury is lost in the sun, transitioning from evening to morning sky this month.

Venus is nearly impossible to spot, low in the west within the first few minutes after sunset.

Mars rises at 1 a.m., low in the east at sunrise. It conjuncts with Jupiter on August 14.

Jupiter rises around 1 a.m., low in the east at sunrise.

Saturn rises around 9 p.m. and is high in the south at dawn.

Notable Space Missions: Flaunting the grotesque way that billionaires now grip most of this country’s wealth, a privately-funded spacewalk is scheduled this month. Two people will try to reprise the feats of Alexei Leonov and Ed White in their Voskhod and Gemini missions of 1965, for their billionaire’s bragging rights. This exemplifies how trillion-dollar tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy are used, to buy expensive toys. The mission was delayed for two years while planners struggled to re-invent the functionality of Gemini and Apollo pressure suits. No useful results appear to be in the offing, that haven’t already been accomplished by hundreds of other spacewalks in the last sixty years.

Frank Sanders, a spectrum scientist at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Boulder, takes astronomy-related inquiries at backyardastronomy1@gmail.com.