Startgaze — Astronomy, Stargazing & Space Science

Telescopic image of comet 220P/McNaught showing a bright teardrop-shaped coma and a short tail against a field of stars

Celestial event

Comet 220P/McNaught: a twice-erupting binocular comet in the pre-dawn sky

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 Andromeda Galaxy (M31): a bright oval core wrapped in tilted spiral arms, with the small companion galaxies M32 and M110 nearby, in a hydrogen-alpha filtered long exposure.

Beginner stargazing

How to find the Andromeda Galaxy with your naked eye

The most distant thing you can see without any equipment is a galaxy 2.5 million light-years away, and autumn is the season to find it. The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) climbs into the evening sky through September and October, and from a reasonably dark spot it looks like a small, elongated grey smudge in the constellation Andromeda. No telescope, no binoculars, no app subscription. Just your eyes, a little patience, and knowing where to point them. ...

A green laser beam from the Very Large Telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert points up into the arch of the Milky Way over the southern night sky.

Astrotourism

Atacama stargazing: the southern sky you can't see from 35° north

I observe from a balcony in Nicosia at 35° north, and there is an entire half of the sky I have never seen. Not “hard to see.” Never. The Southern Cross, the two Magellanic Clouds, Omega Centauri riding high instead of skimming the murk: from Cyprus these sit permanently below my horizon or crawl along it. The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is where I’d go to fix that, and if you observe from anywhere in Europe, it’s probably the single trip that would show you the most sky you’ve never had access to. ...

A single Perseid meteor streaks across a star-filled sky in a 30-second exposure above the dark treeline of Spruce Knob, West Virginia

Celestial event

The 2026 Perseids under a new moon: what the peak night gave me from Troodos

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. ...

A bright bolide with a blue-green trail streaks across the Milky Way over a rocky canyon and a still reflecting pool.

Gear

You don't need a star tracker to shoot the Perseids: the fixed-tripod setup

The single most useful thing I can tell you before the Perseids peak this week: leave the star tracker at home. For meteors you want the opposite of what a tracker gives you: a wide, fixed field of sky and a long run of short exposures, waiting for something to fall into frame. A camera, a fast wide lens, a sturdy tripod, and a cheap intervalometer will catch Perseids all night. That’s the whole kit. ...

A composite of dozens of Perseid meteors radiating across the night sky over the beach at Norderney, Germany, with green aurora glowing along the horizon

AI × astronomy

How machine learning counts meteors: the neural nets watching the Perseids

In three nights the Perseids peak under a new moon, the darkest Perseid maximum in five years. I’ll be up at Troodos with a reclining chair and a tally sheet, counting by eye the way people have counted meteors for a century. Overhead, a network of more than 1,300 cameras will be counting too, and solving an orbit for every meteor bright enough to trigger two of them at once. What made that automation possible is a piece of software: a neural network that learned to tell a meteor from an aeroplane. ...

The Hubble Space Telescope image of Type Ia supernova SN 1994D, a bright point at the lower-left edge of the galaxy NGC 4526, shown to illustrate how a single exploding star can rival its host galaxy in brightness.

Space science

The first light of a supernova: catching a shock breakout in X-rays

On 21 March 2026, an X-ray telescope in orbit registered a faint flash from a galaxy about 500 million light-years away. It lasted roughly seven minutes and then faded. That flash was the first light of a supernova — not the slow brightening you normally see over weeks, but the instant the explosion’s shock wave punched through the surface of the star. Astronomers call it a shock breakout, and this is only the second time in about two decades one has been caught cleanly in X-rays. ...

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory on a snow-covered ridge of Cerro Pachón, Chile, above a sea of clouds at sunset

Space news

Rubin's first data is out. Here's what amateurs can actually do with it.

On July 31, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first science data taken with the LSST Camera: a deep image of the COSMOS field holding more than half a million galaxies and over 50,000 stars in a single frame. That’s the headline. The part that took me a minute to work out, as someone who spent years pulling training data out of pipelines like this one, is what a person outside the collaboration can actually touch. Some of it you can explore tonight from your couch. Most of the catalog is locked for two years. ...

A single Perseid meteor crossing the Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy overhead, above a treeline lit by light pollution on the horizon, at Luhasoo bog in Estonia

Beginner stargazing

Your first meteor shower: how to watch the 2026 Perseids with no gear

If you’ve never sat out on purpose to watch a meteor shower, the night of August 12 into the morning of August 13 is the one to start with. The Perseids peak then, and this year the Moon is new, so there’s no moonlight to drown the fainter streaks. It’s the darkest Perseid peak since 2021. You don’t need a telescope, binoculars, an app, or any skill you don’t already have. You need somewhere reasonably dark, something to lie back on, and about an hour of patience. Here’s exactly what to do with it. ...

The Pic du Midi de Bigorre observatory domes and summit terraces at 2,877 m, with the cable car cables at right and a snow-streaked Pyrenees panorama beyond.

Astrotourism

Pic du Midi: stargazing at 2,877 m in France's only dark sky reserve

Most dark-sky destinations ask you to drive somewhere remote, set up your own gear, and hope the weather holds. Pic du Midi does something almost no other site in Europe offers: it puts a 130-year-old research observatory on a 2,877-metre summit, runs a cable car up to it, and, if you can stomach the price, lets you sleep the night at the top with the telescopes. It sits at the centre of France’s only International Dark Sky Reserve. This is a guide to what the sky is actually like there, how to get up, what the overnight stay includes, and the much cheaper way to use the same dark skies from the valleys below. ...