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.

The peanut-shaped rubble-pile asteroid Itokawa, a small S-type near-Earth asteroid imaged up close by Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft — shown here as a stand-in, since no freely licensed close-up of Kamoʻoalewa exists yet.

Space news

Tianwen-2 reached Kamoʻoalewa, Earth's quasi-moon — and the lunar-origin case is wobbling

A Chinese spacecraft is now station-keeping about 20 km from a rock the size of an office block that has been shadowing Earth for at least a century. On July 6, the China National Space Administration released the first close-up image of asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, confirming that Tianwen-2 had caught its target after a 13-month, roughly one-billion-kilometre chase. The image showed a small, elongated body, the shape you get from a loose pile of rubble rather than a solid boulder. ...

A single meteor streaks over the dark forested ridgelines of Spruce Knob, West Virginia, against a star-filled night sky

Celestial event

The Delta Aquariids peak July 30, but a full moon will drown them this year

Two meteor showers reach their peak on the night of July 30: the Southern Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids. In a good year that’s a fine reason to drive up to Troodos and lie back for a couple of hours. This is not a good year. The Buck Moon turns full on July 29 at 14:36 UT, and two nights later it’s still 96% lit and up from dusk to dawn, parked in the same corner of the southern sky the meteors come from. The plan, then: don’t waste a special trip on July 30. Learn what these two showers are, catch a few of the brighter ones in the darker nights beforehand, and save your effort for August 12, when the Moon disappears entirely. ...

The Milky Way arching over snow-covered trees at Torres del Paine in Patagonia, with Alpha and Beta Centauri the two brightest stars in the band.

Beginner stargazing

Turn your phone into a star chart: a beginner's guide to stargazing apps

The fastest way to start finding things in the night sky costs nothing and is already in your pocket. Hold your phone up, and a decent stargazing app will name the bright dot you’ve been squinting at: Arcturus, or Jupiter, or the International Space Station about to clear your roofline. No telescope, no printed atlas, no memorising constellations first. That’s the pitch, and it mostly holds up. The catch is that the app store is stuffed with near-identical star maps, half of them want a subscription, and the headline “just point your phone at the sky” feature breaks in ways nobody warns you about. Here’s how I’d pick one, based on what I actually keep on my phone in Nicosia and hand to friends who’ve never found anything but the Moon. ...

Small boats moored on calm, deep-blue Adriatic Sea water with distant islands low on the hazy horizon under a clear sky

Astrotourism

Lastovo: stargazing from Croatia's most remote island

Lastovo is the most distant inhabited island from the Croatian mainland — about 14 km of open sea south of Korčula, and a good deal further from any coastal city glow. Roughly 800 people live there, spread across a municipality of 46 islands and islets. In 2008 the island swapped out every public streetlight for low-wattage, full-cutoff lamps that throw nothing upward, years before Croatia had a law requiring it. The result is one of the darkest inhabited places left in the Mediterranean, and a live candidate for International Dark Sky Park status. ...

An amateur astronomer stands beside a large Dobsonian telescope at dusk in the Negev desert, ready for a night of observing.

Gear

Your first two eyepieces: what focal length and exit pupil actually mean

The two most useful eyepieces you can own probably aren’t the two that came in the box, and choosing them takes two numbers, not brand loyalty. Your telescope most likely arrived with a 25mm and a 10mm eyepiece. This piece is about what those millimetres actually do, why the 10mm is so uncomfortable to look through, and which two eyepieces to add first so you cover the sky from wide star fields to the cloud belts on Jupiter. No “best eyepiece” ranking. Just the arithmetic, worked on the scopes beginners actually buy. ...

The faint giant low-surface-brightness galaxy Malin 1, a sprawling pale spiral against a field of smaller galaxies, imaged in colour by the DESI Legacy Imaging Survey, one of the sky surveys used to train astronomical foundation models.

AI × astronomy

Foundation models came to astronomy — and one matched a supervised network with 1% of the labels

Here’s the number that made me put my coffee down. A model trained on Euclid galaxy images matched a fully supervised network at estimating galaxy redshifts and stellar masses — using 1% of the labeled examples. Ninety-nine percent of the labels thrown away, same accuracy. That result is from the Euclid Quick Data Release paper by Siudek et al., published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on 30 June 2026. It’s one of three papers from the last two years that convinced me astronomy has quietly acquired what the machine-learning world calls foundation models: a single large model pretrained once on a mountain of unlabeled data, then adapted cheaply to many different tasks. ...

The faint interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as a small diffuse smudge among background stars, imaged the day after its discovery.

Space science

3I/ATLAS: Webb's spectra point to an interstellar comet older than the Sun

I’ve now watched three objects from other star systems pass through ours, and only one of them said anything worth hearing. The first, 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, was gone almost before we understood what it was: a fast, tumbling sliver that never grew a tail and left us arguing about its shape. The second, 2I/Borisov in 2019, was a proper comet with a coma and a tail, alien in origin, but the kind of object we already know how to study. The third is 3I/ATLAS, and it did what the other two wouldn’t. It stayed in front of the James Webb Space Telescope long enough for Webb to read its chemistry line by line, and the readout points to a comet that froze into existence before the Sun did. ...

NASA's Pegasus barge, carrying the Roman Space Telescope in a white shipping container, moored at the Launch Complex 39 turn basin with the Vehicle Assembly Building behind it

Space news

The Roman Space Telescope launches August 30 — a survey machine, not a telescope you point

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope reached Kennedy Space Center on June 21, arriving by barge at the Launch Complex 39 turn basin, the same channel that once floated Saturn V and Shuttle hardware to the pad. It’s now in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility being prepped for a Falcon Heavy launch no earlier than August 30, roughly eight months ahead of its original schedule. That last detail is rare enough for a flagship NASA mission to deserve its own headline. ...

Numerical-relativity simulation showing two black holes spiralling together above a warped grid of spacetime, with the emitted gravitational waveform rippling outward

Space science

A decade ago LIGO caught one black hole collision. The catalog now holds 390.

On 14 September 2015, two detectors in Louisiana and Washington State registered a rising chirp that lasted about a fifth of a second: two black holes of roughly 36 and 29 solar masses spiralling together 1.3 billion light-years away, their final orbits stretching and squeezing the ground by less than the width of a proton. That single event, GW150914, opened gravitational-wave astronomy and won a Nobel Prize. On 26 May 2026, the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) collaboration released GWTC-5.0, the fifth edition of its Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog. The running total of detected events since 2015 now stands at 390. A pile that size changes what the field can do. Gravitational-wave detection has crossed from hunting individual events into doing population statistics: this is a black-hole census now, and the population is starting to talk back. ...

Wide-field photo of the summer Milky Way stretching from Vulpecula down to Scorpius, its bright star clouds crowding toward the galactic center low in the sky

Beginner stargazing

How to find the center of the galaxy with your own eyes this July

On a dark night this month you can stand in a field, face south, and look almost exactly toward the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. No telescope. No binoculars, though they help. Just your eyes, a clear southern horizon, and enough patience to let them adjust. The direction sits low in the sky between two constellations that are up all July: Scorpius and Sagittarius. You won’t see the black hole itself (its light is buried behind thousands of light-years of dust), but you can point your face down the barrel toward it and see the thickest, brightest star clouds of the whole Milky Way piled up in that direction. From my usual dark spot in the Troodos mountains, that stretch of sky is the best thing summer offers. Here’s how to find it. ...