The Brief

It's officially summer in Southern California, and the warm evenings ahead are perfect for taking in the night sky. Today is also the start of the seasonal, free Star Parties at Griffith Observatory that run from June through September.

If you go, you might meet local amateur astronomer, Spencer Soohoo. By day, he’s a research scientist at Cedar Sinai but in his off time, he’s an active member of the Los Angeles Astronomical Society.

We asked Soohoo for some advice on how to get into amateur astronomy in Southern California — if you’re already into stargazing — how to up your game.

Getting started

To kick us off, we asked Soohoo to recommend a few places where the stars may be easier to spot:

• Joshua Tree: He says the national park "is starting to get a little more light pollution now than before but it's still fairly decent."
• I-5 near Frasier Park: "There's a couple of turnouts you can go to."
• Saddleback Butte State Park: Soohoo has this caveat: "There's a lot of light now from the Lancaster-Palmdale area. But the last time I went, you could still see the Milky Way without too much trouble."
• For really dark skies: You have to drive a distance, probably about an 1 1/2 to 2 hours away.

Not up for that drive? Soohoo says "to be honest with you, if you're OK with looking at the planets and some of the brighter nebula, you can even do that from downtown L.A."

What can you see in SoCal this time of year?

Soohoo says right now the only night object "really prominent" is Venus.

"If you are up around maybe midnight or 1 a.m., you can see Saturn and Jupiter will rise a couple hours after that," he says.

How to spot planets

We asked Soohoo what he'd recommend folks use if they want to know where the constellations and planets are specifically in the sky.

Soohoo says his favorite smartphone app is Sky Safari ("I think it's about $9 to $10") but there are other free apps to check out.

"They're tied into the GPS in your phone and they'll show you what the sky looks like at that particular time," he says. "Some of them have what they call augmented reality. So they'll actually use the camera on the phone and superimpose the background of what you're seeing along with the sky chart."

Will the northern lights be back in Southern California?

Recently and unexpectedly, people were able to catch a glimpse of the northern lights exceptionally far south. So we asked Soohoo if that's going to be possible over the summer months.

He doubts it.

"It's rare that you'd be able to see them this far south," he says. "But I know that the last time you could see the northern lights from Mount Wilson — that one night that they were visible — the marine layer had moved in and blocked out all the light pollution from downtown L.A. and so you could see the northern lights there."

What to expect at Griffith Observatory

Griffith Observatory hosts monthly star parties during the summer that are free to the public. Volunteers from telescope groups and the L.A. Astronomical Society are there and Soohoo says participants can expect 25 to 40 telescopes to be set up on the grounds.

"We basically set up our telescopes on the lawn and point them at whatever target we want to and invite people to look through them," he explains. "And I personally focus on the moon because you'd be amazed at how many people have never seen the moon through a telescope in their lives. I can't tell you how many languages I've heard people say, 'Wow, it's just incredible.'"

Soohoo said he got his "greatest thrill" from helping an 82-year-old woman who had never looked through a telescope in her life.

"I showed her the moon and just to watch the expression on her face as it lit up — that's why we do it," Soohoo said.

How to attend

The Griffith Observatory lists the following dates for public star parties:

• Saturday, June 24: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.
• Saturday, July 22: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.
• Saturday, Aug. 26: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.
• Saturday, Sep. 23: 2:00 pm - 9:45 p.m.

You can find more resources and events at the Los Angeles Astronomical Society website or on the Griffith Observatory website.

Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across California on Friday demanding that local officials set aside and verify ballots that the Department of Justice said may belong to noncitizens, according to the Los Angeles County registrar and a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between California and President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which has recently focused on the state in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections. Data shows illegal voting by people who aren’t U.S. citizens is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of races.

Earlier this month, the federal government targeted Los Angeles County and the California Secretary of State’s office in a lawsuit that aimed to block them from counting the votes of roughly 20,000 people who are “likely” noncitizen voters. A hearing on the case is scheduled for Tuesday.

The Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit court of appeals to rule on the lawsuit barring a decision from the district judge assigned to the case. They set a deadline for Saturday.

Now, according to the LA County registrar’s office, at least 18 counties across the state have received similar letters. They have been given a 48 hour deadline to provide identifying information corresponding with ballots that the federal government believes were sent to noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The letter requests that county officials also sequester any ballots where citizenship cannot be verified.

“Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.

The Justice Department is asking counties to send information about the voters it suspects are noncitizens including social security numbers, ID information, a copy of their registration and more.

That information can help the government and state quickly assess each person suspected of illegally registering to vote, said the letter sent to San Bernardino County voting officials. The letter says the government’s list of suspected noncitizen voters includes 1,133 people from the inland Southern California county.

California’s secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar have opposed the federal government’s demands. In legal filings, lawyers for California say the request threatens to delay the certification of the vote and undermine the legitimacy of the November midterms. They have also argued that the federal government’s data is unreliable and that their demands risk disenfranchisement of citizens.

Voting is underway in California, with the state’s more than 23 million registered voters receiving ballots in the mail earlier this month. The state said in legal filings that over 330,000 mail-in ballots have already been counted.

The letters on Friday came on the heels of statewide sweep by federal authorities earlier in the week, where 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Those charges could lead to years in prison.

The California State University faculty union is asking its members to authorize a strike, as negotiations with the California State University system remain stalled.

This summer, the California Faculty Association declared an impasse after 16 months of negotiation with the CSU. The union’s president said university officials negotiating with the union have “not been honest agents.”

If a majority of members approve the strike authorization, voting from Oct. 26 through Nov. 19, CFA leadership would be authorized to call a strike.

The union, which represents 29,000 professors and other university employees, is seeking salary increases, changes to faculty workloads and protections related to the use of artificial intelligence.

In recent weeks, CSU has reached tentative agreements with three unions: the Statewide University Police Association, the United Auto Workers Local 4123 and Academic Professionals of California. Together, the agreements cover 14,000 university employees.

The tentative agreements, which must be approved by union members and CSU’s Board of Trustees, include an 8% salary increase over two years, along with one-time raises negotiated by each bargaining unit.

It can be tough to be tall. I am 6 feet, hear me out.

And yes, complaining about being able to see over a crowd may sound silly. But height can be a love-hate relationship for many people, particularly towering women and children who feel like they just don’t fit in.

Well, that’s where a worldwide social club for tall people comes in, but whether it’ll reach its 100th birthday is in question.

Tall Clubs International is an organization spanning more than a dozen states and several countries that offers tall adults a chance to connect and commiserate. The original chapter, founded in Los Angeles in 1938, is called the California Tip Toppers.

To get into the L.A. group, men have to be 6 feet 4 inches or taller, and women have to be at least 6 feet. One of the tallest members of the organization is 7 feet 2 inches, and honestly, I couldn’t help but perk up at the opportunity to feel short for once in my life.

At 13, I was still growing at 5 feet 10, towering over almost every kid in my freshman high school class. One of the first questions people still ask me is whether I played volleyball or basketball, and I’ve learned to laugh at the look they get when I say I preferred theater.

“People see how tall you are, they expect ‘Oh, you're going to be great on the basketball court,’” said Michele Cripps, a 6-foot-1 member of the California Tip Toppers, who joined in 1996. She's married to William Walter Wiseman II, a fellow member. “Well, I'm sorry, white girls can't jump sometimes, and I'm one of them.”

Some of the tall club members are generational, encouraged to join by their parents or older relatives, which has started to pose its own problems as the chapters get older.

What’s the big deal anyways?

William Walter Wiseman II and Michele Cripps at the 2026 Tall Clubs International convention in Hollywood.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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The chapters became a way for tall people to trade practical tips, like which stores sold pants that actually covered your ankles or shoes that didn’t need to be specially made.

“I was always being kidded about my pants being too short or my clothes not fitting correctly,” said Wiseman, who's nearly 6 feet 9 and also wasn’t much of a basketball player. “And as I grew as an adult, people are a little bit afraid to approach people that are tall.”

Wiseman has a good sense of humor about his height, cracking jokes that I’ve added to my arsenal when answering “how’s the weather up there?” But he doesn’t gloss over the pain points either — Wiseman can’t fit into cars or roller coasters, hotel beds are never long enough, and airplanes can be an expensive nightmare.

“It's not just the socialization of being tall, but it's also the physicality of it,” he said. “It's almost a handicap to be tall.”

Members of the Tall Club of Orange County at the 2026 convention.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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Cripps said she was a skinny kid, but she couldn’t help but feel “huge” growing up a head above everyone else, which hurt her young self-esteem and made dating more difficult.

The clubs gave them both a chance to see eye to eye with a room full of people for the first time, and potentially even find a partner. Wiseman’s parents met in the Dayton Altitudians tall club in Ohio, decades before Wiseman and Cripps met through their own California clubs.

“The people that married inside the club stayed married,” said Wiseman, who lives in Torrance with Cripps. “The people that married outside of the club got divorced.”

A Dayton Daily News clipping of William Walter Wiseman II's father measuring tall teens in the Dayton, Ohio area from November 19, 1958. 

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Courtesy William Walter Wiseman II

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Future of the club in question

But now, the California Tip Toppers is having trouble bringing in new, younger members — a recruitment crisis that’s essentially dissolved groups in other areas, Wiseman said.

Members of the California Tip Toppers at the 2026 convention.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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“We're facing the same challenges like all other clubs,” Cripps and Wiseman said, jumping in to finish each other’s thoughts. “Some of it could be generational. Some of it's that since COVID, the clubs have not been quite as active as they used to be. Some people [don’t have] homes to open up anymore … and we're all getting older.”

The club is at a crossroads: Get new members on board or fade away. The couple seems to have made it a mission to rejuvenate the California Tip Toppers, but Cripps was frank when she said they’re not sure how to get more people involved, whether it's fresh events or outreach opportunities.

At the end of the day, they’re hoping the club and the community it fosters can help others learn how to “stand tall” and be proud.

The clubs crown a new Miss Tall International at a formal pageant held during the annual convention. The former Miss Tall Clubs International that were at the 2026 convention from left to right: Susan Hopkins, 2019, from the Tall Club of Orange County, Martine Whitford, 1959, from the Los Angeles Higher Ups, Norma Forrest, 1996, from the Tall Club of Toronto and Mary Eleman, 2022, from the Central Arizona Tall Society.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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Members of the Tall Clubs International convention committee.  From left to right: Barry Umbs from Milwaukee, William Walter Wiseman II from the California Tip Toppers, Jim Nelson from the Paramount Tall Club-Chicago and Michele Cripps from the California Tip Toppers.

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Courtesy Michele Cripps and William Walter Wiseman II

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“It’s a challenge, but it’s something that was given to us,” Cripps said. “I say as I've aged, I should have listened to my mother, I should have stood up tall.”

Moms everywhere, mine included, rejoice.

“Everybody wants to be something different than they have,” Cripps continued. “So, try and embrace what you have. Life is too short, and it goes too quick.”

Beyond the Rose Bowl and historic bungalows, Pasadena has stranger tales to tell. David Kalbeitzer has been seeking out those stories where rocket science meets the occult and ghosts haunt the city’s grandest buildings.

For Kalbeitzer, a Disney executive who investigates the paranormal in his free time, his fascination with the city’s mysterious side started when he bought a Victorian north of Old Town.

He sensed a spirit at the open house a dozen years ago and took it as a reason to move his family to Pasadena. Then he started learning the city’s history.

David Kalbeitzer, a paranormal investigator from Pasadena, is giving a talk about the city's strange history Saturday night in Old Town.

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Courtesy of David Kalbeitzer

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“I realized, ‘Oh, this place called us just as much as we were looking for it,’” he said.

On Saturday night, he’s sharing the lore he’s collected at Mesmer Mesmer an Old Town shop and event space. While the event is full, there’s a waitlist, and more talks featuring Kalbeitzer are in the works.

A city of ghost stories 

Ask Kalbeitzer about haunted Pasadena, and the list stretches from alleyways to the Colorado Street Bridge to Castle Green, the turreted former hotel overlooking Central Park.

“The Pasadena Playhouse theater is, you know, very haunted,” he added.

He says theatergoers have reported hearing disembodied voices.

Theatergoers over the years have described hearing voices and seeing apparitions at the Pasadena Playhouse.

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Jeff Lorch

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Courtesy of Pasadena Playhouse

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“And you look, and there’s no one there, or apparitions that have been seen sort of standing in the corner, and then you walk up, and they kind of disappear like shadowy figures,” he said.

As for the spirit that helped draw him to his current Pasadena home?

Kalbeitzer says she’s still around — and his psychic friend Michael Kouri shared her name: Dolores.

“It’s actually haunted by a very kind ghost that looks out for the house, protects my family and has been able to activate our alarm,” he said.

Having a Dolores in the house might send some people running, but Kalbeitzer said he grew up in a haunted house in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

And when his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a teenage Kalbeitzer started seeking out places known for paranormal activity.

Rocket science, ritual magic and mind-reading

Having lived in different neighborhoods in L.A., Kalbeitzer says there’s something uniquely otherworldly about Pasadena — and it goes beyond ghost stories.

He said the city has an energy that draws people exploring the unknown, perhaps most famously Jack Parsons.

The rocket pioneer who helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory also practiced ritual magic at his Pasadena home with the likes of L. Ron Hubbard before he founded Scientology.

“Many people call it the occult," Kalbeitzer said. "I don’t know that I fully subscribe to that, but there is spiritualism and occult mixed in there."

Then there was Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, whose interests while living in Pasadena extended to telepathy and séances.

Upton Sinclair, pictured with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair in 1935, several years after he published a book examining her reported telepathy.

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Los Angeles Times via Wikimedia Commons

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In 1930, Sinclair published Mental Radio, a book about experiments in mind-reading. Albert Einstein provided a preface. Yes, that Einstein, who would spend the following winter at Caltech expanding on the theories of relativity and cosmology.

“It’s the craziest mixture of things that were happening at that time and all of it at the same time,” Kalbeitzer said.

A presence in the shop 

The event couldn’t have found a more appropriate venue.

Since opening five months ago in Old Town, Mesmer Mesmer has embraced the dark and mysterious, offering tarot and crystal readings and hosting events on subjects such as hip-hop’s relationship with ghosts.

Tyke O'Brien opened her shop Mesmer Mesmer earlier this year to create a third space and offer books and esoterica alongside clothing.

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Tyke O'Brien

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At that event, a medium told owner Tyke O’Brien she could sense a presence in the shop, which formerly housed a bridal store.

“She goes, ‘Do you ever feel it?’ And I’m like, ‘I am such a bummer,” O’Brien recounted. “I wish I could say yes."

The same can be said for this writer who’s lived and worked in and around Pasadena for years without so much as a brush with the otherworldly.

Kalbeitzer, on the other hand, reports supernatural encounters all around town.

“Everyone has the ability to have those experiences," he said. "But I do think how you see yourself in the world has a lot more to do with it, and whether you want to have those experiences."