Astronomy · stargazing · space science

The sky is out there. Start gazing.

Celestial event previews, plain-language science explainers, and honest gear notes — written by an amateur astronomer in Cyprus. 3–5 articles a week. No cosmic ballet.

Colour image of Phobos from NASA's HiRISE camera: a dark, lumpy, cratered moon with grooves across its surface and the large crater Stickney at lower right

Space news

JAXA's MMX heads for Phobos: what 10 grams of a Martian moon can settle

JAXA’s Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft, MMX, is scheduled to lift off on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima at 04:41:03 Japan time on 20 October 2026. That’s 19:41:03 UTC on Monday 19 October, or 22:41 here in Cyprus, where we’re still on summer time for one more week. If the weather or the rocket says no, there’s a backup period running to 7 November, with a separate launch time for each day (JAXA launch notice). The goal is to bring more than 10 grams of Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, back to Earth in JAXA’s fiscal year 2031. ...

The Milky Way arching over the telescope domes of the Teide Observatory on the Izaña ridge in Tenerife, with Scorpius and Antares on the right and a faint glow of coastal light on the left horizon.

Astrotourism

Stargazing on Teide: how dark Tenerife's sky really is, and where to stand

Tenerife is the easiest high-altitude sky in Europe to get to: two international airports and a paved road up to the Teide cable car’s base station at 2,356 m. The catch is in the photometry. The professional observatory on the Izaña ridge measures its moonless zenith at 21.20 magnitudes per square arcsecond, half a magnitude brighter than La Palma’s Roque de los Muchachos, about 144 km to the west-northwest. Below I go through where that extra light comes from, which caldera viewpoints to use, what the guided tours cost, and what a winter trip to 28° north shows you that Cyprus can’t. ...

Diagonal white streaks left by more than 25 Starlink satellites crossing a Lowell Observatory telescope image of the NGC 5353/4 galaxy group, taken on 25 May 2019.

AI × astronomy

Satellite trails in 1 in 6 VST images: how neural networks find them

In 2023 the VLT Survey Telescope on Cerro Paranal recorded 1,246,048 CCD frames with its OmegaCAM imager. A team led by Elisabeth Rachith at EPFL ran all of them through a deep-learning streak detector, and their June 2026 preprint reports 25,335 streaks from satellites, rocket bodies and debris, with at least one in 16.9% of exposures. In the months checked by hand, about a fifth of the confirmed streaks matched nothing in the public satellite catalogue. Below: how these networks work, what the VST numbers say, and why a stack of backyard subs mostly doesn’t need one. ...

A line of evenly spaced Starlink satellites crossing a deep-blue twilight sky above the painted town hall on Tübingen's market square

Beginner stargazing

Plane, satellite or space station? How to identify a moving light in the night sky

A point of light is sliding across the sky, silently, and you want to know what it is. You can almost always answer that in about ten seconds with four checks. Look at whether it blinks, whether it moves in a dead-straight line at an even pace, whether it fades out in the middle of the sky, and how long it lasts. No gear needed, and a free pass-prediction website will confirm your guess afterwards. The key below is the one I use from my balcony in Nicosia; the sections after it explain each line. ...

Artist's illustration of a young star inside a broad blue ring of dusty debris, with a small planetary body crashing into a larger one in the foreground and glowing orange vapor streaming from the impact.

Space science

The dust of Moon-forming crashes: what Webb found in 21 extreme debris disks

The leading explanation for our Moon is a crash: something roughly the size of Mars hit the young Earth, and the debris that stayed in orbit pulled itself together into the Moon. Nobody was around to watch that, but a new study shows we can watch the same kind of event around other stars through the dust it leaves behind. Kate Su of the Space Science Institute in Boulder and nine co-authors combined JWST and Spitzer mid-infrared spectra of 21 “extreme debris disks”, rare systems where planet-sized bodies are colliding right now. The dust chemistry splits them in two. Silica-rich disks point to violent crashes between Mars-sized embryos, and they turn up only around stars younger than about 300 million years. Silica-poor disks point to Moon-sized impacts, and they also appear around much older stars. The paper is accepted in The Astrophysical Journal (preprint: arXiv:2607.06684), and NASA and ESA/Webb released it on 2026-10-01. ...

The original ZWO Seestar S50 smart telescope on its tripod, photographed from below against a clear blue daytime sky, its rounded optical tube raised above the Seestar-branded base, with treetops along the bottom edge of the frame.

Gear

Seestar S50 Pro vs the original S50: is the upgrade worth $999?

ZWO’s Seestar S50 Pro started shipping on September 1 and now lists at $999 (€999 in Europe) on ZWO’s product page, after an $899 launch price that ended on September 15. I’ve run the original S50 from my Bortle 7 balcony in Nicosia for most of a year, so the question I care about is narrow: if you already own an S50, what does $999 buy you? It buys the same light grasp and the same pixel scale, roughly 3.7 times the sky per frame, a 67% bigger battery, a wide-angle camera, and a main sensor nobody expected. For most S50 owners imaging from a city, I’d hold off. For a few, it fixes the exact thing that’s been annoying them. ...

Oblique Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter view of McGetchin crater, a fresh 222-metre crater on grey lunar plains surrounded by a bright starburst of ejecta rays

Space news

McGetchin crater: the Moon took a 15-kiloton hit in 2024 and nobody saw the flash

Sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024, something the size of a three-to-six-storey building slammed into the eastern side of the Moon’s near side and blew out a crater 222 m across and 43 m deep. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the aftermath within weeks, but nobody noticed until 2025, and the results only went public this month. The crater, now named McGetchin, is the largest fresh impact crater ever documented anywhere in the Solar System. It released roughly 15 kilotons of TNT-equivalent energy, and no telescope on Earth recorded the flash. ...

Neptune imaged by NASA's Voyager 2 in 1989 — a deep-blue disc marked by the dark oval of the Great Dark Spot and streaks of white, high-altitude methane-ice cloud.

Celestial event

Neptune at opposition, September 26: how to find the most distant planet

Neptune reaches opposition in the small hours of September 26 (around 00–01 UT), which makes this the best week of the year to track down the solar system’s most distant planet. Opposition just means the planet sits opposite the Sun in our sky: it rises at sunset, climbs highest near local midnight, and stays up until dawn. It’s also as close and as bright as Neptune gets in 2026 — magnitude 7.8, about 28.9 AU away. That brightness still isn’t enough for your eyes alone. Magnitude 7.8 is roughly three times fainter than the dimmest star you can catch with the naked eye under a good sky, so this is a binocular-and-telescope target. What you’re hunting is a single blue-grey point among the faint stars of Pisces, and the whole game is telling it apart from them. ...

The domed astronomical observatory of the Aosta Valley (OAVdA) at Lignan in the Saint-Barthélemy valley, Italian Alps.

Astrotourism

Stargazing in the Aosta Valley: Italy's first Starlight-certified dark sky

Europe’s darkest skies usually come with a catch: the certified ones are a long way from anywhere. La Palma means an Atlantic island and a ridge road you mostly can’t drive after dark. Namibia is a different continent. But there’s one properly dark, formally certified European sky that sits a 40-minute drive off a motorway, in a country I hadn’t covered here until now: a side valley in the Italian Alps called Saint-Barthélemy, above the town of Nus in the Aosta Valley. ...

Saturn imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope with its rings turned nearly edge-on, appearing as a thin bright line across the planet's disc, with two of its moons as bright points at upper left.

Gear

How much telescope do you need to see Saturn's rings?

Saturn reaches opposition on October 4, 2026, which is the best night of the year to point anything at it. Around that date the planet sits opposite the Sun in our sky: closest to Earth for the year, brightest for the year at about magnitude 0.3 (apparent), and above the horizon all night. The question I get every autumn is how much telescope you need to actually see the rings. The answer depends entirely on what you mean by “see.” ...