Startgaze — Astronomy, Stargazing & Space Science

Full disc of the Moon showing maria and craters, imaged by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Celestial event

May 31 brings a Blue Micromoon — the smallest full moon of 2026

On May 31 at 08:45 UTC, the Moon reaches full phase for the second time this month. That second-in-a-month qualifier makes it a Blue Moon by the modern calendar definition. It also happens to sit near apogee — 406,135 km from Earth — making it a Micromoon: roughly 5.5% smaller in angular diameter and about 10% dimmer than an average full moon. It’s the most distant full moon of 2026. And if you walk outside that night expecting something visibly unusual, you’ll be disappointed. ...

Space news

SMILE is in orbit: what happens between now and the first X-ray image of Earth's magnetosphere

At 03:52 UTC this morning, a Vega-C rocket lifted off from Kourou carrying SMILE — the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer — into a 707 km circular parking orbit. ESA’s New Norcia ground station in Western Australia picked up the spacecraft’s first signal at 04:48 UTC. Solar panels deployed one minute later. The first mission designed to X-ray Earth’s entire magnetosphere in real time is alive and drawing power. I covered the science in detail two weeks ago, before the launch window opened. Now that the spacecraft is actually flying, here’s what happens between today and the first X-ray image of Earth’s magnetic shield — and when the data starts mattering for aurora forecasts. ...

Thousands of galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Fields parallel observation near Abell 2744, showing the deep universe in the constellation Sculptor

Space science

JWST's largest survey mapped the cosmic web across 13 billion years

When you look at galaxies through a telescope — scattered across the field like grains on dark cloth — it’s tempting to think they’re placed at random. They aren’t. Galaxies live on a structure so vast that the only metaphor that survives at scale is a web: long filaments of matter, hundreds of millions of light-years across, connecting dense knots of galaxy clusters and skirting nearly empty voids. This month, the largest survey JWST has carried out gave us the clearest map of that web to date, tracing it back to a time when the universe was barely a billion years old. ...

The Big Dipper asterism above trees at night, with thin clouds, over Brastad, Sweden

Beginner stargazing

Five star-hops from the Big Dipper: a beginner's map to the May sky

You don’t need an app tonight. You need one pattern. The Big Dipper sits almost directly overhead on May evenings from mid-northern latitudes, and its seven stars — all between magnitude +1.8 and +3.3, easy to spot even under suburban light pollution — form the single best starting point for learning the rest of the sky. Five hops, no telescope, about ten minutes. What star-hopping is Star-hopping is the oldest navigation trick in observational astronomy: use a pattern you already recognise to find something you don’t. Point your eyes at a known bright star, move a known angular distance in a known direction, and land on the next target. ...

Astrotourism

Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve: 10,000 km² of protected night sky in Portugal's Alentejo

Southern Portugal’s Alentejo region is flat, dry, and almost empty. The largest artificial lake in Western Europe — Alqueva — sits at its center, surrounded by cork oak plains, whitewashed villages, and roughly zero urban light domes. In 2011, the Starlight Foundation (supported by UNESCO, the IAU, and UNWTO) certified a 10,000 km² zone around the lake as the world’s first Starlight Tourism Destination. Fourteen years later, the reserve is still one of the darkest accessible skies in Europe, and one of the easiest to reach. ...

AI-generated illustration — a star field with translucent rings around several stars representing exoplanet transit signals

AI × astronomy

RAVEN found 118 planets in NASA's TESS data — here's how the algorithm works

A team at the University of Warwick pointed a machine-learning pipeline at four years of NASA TESS full-frame images — 2.2 million stars — and pulled out 118 validated planets, roughly 1,000 new candidates, and the first direct measurement of how scarce Neptune-sized worlds are in tight orbits. The pipeline is called RAVEN (RAnking and Validation of ExoplaNets), and the paper landed in MNRAS this spring. I spend most of my telescope time on deep-sky imaging from my balcony in Nicosia, but I follow the exoplanet pipeline papers closely because they sit exactly at the intersection I care about: where does the ML end and the astrophysics begin? RAVEN is a clean case study. ...

Hubble image of globular cluster IC 4499 — thousands of resolved stars against deep space

Gear

The Seestar S50, six months in: what I'd tell a friend before they buy one

The ZWO Seestar S50 sat on my balcony railing in Nicosia for 47 sessions between November 2025 and April 2026. I pointed it at globulars, planetaries, galaxies, the Moon, and — twice — Jupiter. After six months I know exactly who should buy one and, more usefully, who should save the money for something else. The setup that kept me coming back The S50 weighs 1.5 kg. I carry it out with one hand, set it on the railing, open the app, and I’m imaging within three minutes. No polar alignment, no balance weights, no multi-star alignment routine. The internal plate solver — the same astrometry.net algorithm I wrote about last month — handles pointing. Tap an object, the telescope slews, stacking begins. ...

Space news

ESA's SMILE launches May 19: the first spacecraft to X-ray Earth's magnetic shield

In twelve days, a Vega-C rocket lifts off from Kourou carrying the first spacecraft designed to image Earth’s entire magnetosphere in soft X-rays while simultaneously filming the aurora in ultraviolet. ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ SMILE mission (Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer) will watch, in real time, how Earth’s magnetic shield deforms under solar wind pressure and trace that energy all the way down to the auroral oval. ...

A bright meteor streaks across the Milky Way during the Perseid meteor shower, photographed in a 30-second exposure from Spruce Knob, West Virginia

Celestial event

Eta Aquariids 2026: what to expect from tonight's peak with an 84% moon

The Eta Aquariids peaked at 03:51 UTC on May 5, but this shower has a broad maximum — activity tonight and tomorrow morning (May 6–7) will be nearly as strong as peak night. The problem isn’t timing. It’s the moon: an 84%-illuminated waning gibbous will sit above the horizon during the entire pre-dawn window when the radiant is highest. That cuts your visible count roughly in half compared to a moonless year. ...

Gear

Binoculars or a first telescope? What I actually tell beginners in 2026

If you have €120–€180 and you’ve never owned an astronomy instrument, buy a pair of 10×50 binoculars. Don’t buy a telescope. I’ve watched too many friends spend €200 on a wobbly 70mm department-store refractor, see Saturn as a tiny pixel-blur once, and shelve the thing for good. There’s exactly one case where that advice flips, and I’ll get to it. But the default answer, for the person walking into this hobby with no gear and no specific target in mind, is binoculars. ...