Events

The Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of October 21–22, 2026, and this year the Moon decides when you go out. A waxing gibbous Moon, about 80% lit, hangs over the evening sky and doesn’t set until 02:55 local time in Cyprus (23:55 UT) on the peak morning. After that you get roughly two and a half hours of properly dark sky before dawn starts at 05:34. Those happen to be the hours when the Orionid radiant is highest anyway. Set an alarm for 03:00, look south, and expect around 10–12 meteors an hour from a dark site, fewer from a town. No equipment needed. ...

Two bright planets are up before dawn right now, and the gap between them shrinks every morning for the next month. This morning Mars and Jupiter are 12.7° apart, a bit more than a fist held at arm’s length. By the morning of November 16 that gap is down to 1.19°, a little over two full-Moon widths. Closest approach is around 02:00 UT on the 16th, which is 04:00 in Cyprus, with both planets riding high in the south-east. You don’t need any equipment for this one. Pick a morning each week, note how far apart the two points are, and watch Mars catch up. Binoculars add Jupiter’s moons. Around the 16th, a small telescope at its lowest power can just about hold both planets in a single field. ...

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. ...

A white dwarf in the galaxy NGC 7331 tore itself apart in a thermonuclear explosion, and the light is only now reaching us, bright enough to catch in a backyard telescope. SN 2026aaiv is a Type Ia supernova in a spiral galaxy in Pegasus, about 44 million light-years away, and it’s still brightening. The ATLAS survey flagged it on September 1; by September 11 it had climbed to roughly magnitude 13.8, and observers expect a peak near 11th to 12th magnitude within a week or two. Pegasus rides almost overhead from 35°N around midnight this month, so from Cyprus the timing and the geometry both line up. If you own a telescope or a smart scope, the next couple of weeks are the window. ...

Venus is about to be the brightest it gets all year. On the evening of September 18, 2026, it reaches greatest brilliancy at about magnitude −4.8, outshining everything in the sky except the Sun and Moon. The catch, if you’re watching from the eastern Mediterranean like I am at 35°N, is that this is a low, quick apparition: Venus sits close to the western horizon after sunset and drops out of view inside about an hour. You don’t need any gear — it’s a naked-eye object that punches straight through city light — but you do need a clear line to the west-southwest and the discipline to be outside on time. The best single evening is September 14, when a thin crescent Moon parks within 5° of it. ...

There’s a comet in the pre-dawn sky right now that most people will never hear about, because it isn’t the kind that makes the news. Comet 220P/McNaught is a small periodic visitor that has done something unusual twice this summer: it blew up. Two separate outbursts, in late May and again on August 5, dragged a 17th-magnitude speck up into binocular range. In mid-August it was sitting around 6th to 7th magnitude, low in the constellation Cetus before sunrise: a binocular object under a dark sky, and already fading. If you want it, this is the week to try. ...

The 2026 Perseids peaked overnight on August 12–13 under a new moon, and I drove up to Troodos to catch the plateau’s rise before the sky brightened. The number first: in the darkest hour, with the radiant past 60° altitude, I counted just over 40 meteors. That’s not a storm, but it’s the most I’ve logged from a Perseid night since 2021, and the sky earned every one — no Moon, no haze, and a horizon dark enough to watch the Perseus radiant climb out of the northeast on its own. ...

The Perseids peak overnight on August 12–13, and this year the Moon stays out of the way entirely. It turns new on August 12 at 17:37 UT, so the peak night is as dark as any night gets. That combination, the richest summer shower landing on a moonless sky, is what observers wait years for, and it hasn’t happened since 2021. If you clear a single night for meteors in 2026, make it this one. Here’s when to be out, where to point your eyes, and why the eclipse dominating everyone’s calendar that same day is, for those of us in the eastern Mediterranean, the less interesting half of August 12. ...

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. ...

From my balcony in Nicosia I’ll see nothing on August 12. The Moon’s shadow doesn’t reach the eastern Mediterranean, so from Cyprus the Moon never crosses the solar disc at all. This is the guide I’d hand a friend who can get themselves somewhere the eclipse actually happens, whether that’s the path of totality across northern Spain or a deep partial from a back garden in London. One rule matters more than everything below it: until the Sun is 100% covered, you look through a certified solar filter or you don’t look at all. Not at 90 percent, not at 99. And if you aren’t standing inside the narrow path of totality, that means filters on for the whole eclipse, first bite to last. Everything else here is built around that line. ...