Startgaze — Astronomy, Stargazing & Space Science

A single meteor streaks across a star-filled night sky above the dark treeline of Spruce Knob, West Virginia, during the annual Perseid meteor shower

Celestial event

Perseids 2026: a moonless peak on August 12–13, the best in five years

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. ...

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31), a bright oval spiral tilted almost edge-on with dark dust lanes crossing its glowing white core, surrounded by a dense field of foreground stars, with the small companion galaxies M32 and M110 nearby.

Gear

The Seestar S50 is discontinued — is 30 mm enough from a city balcony?

The ZWO Seestar S50 I reviewed in May is out of production. Walk into the smart-telescope aisle today and the Seestar you can actually buy new is a 30 mm scope: the S30 or the S30 Pro. The “successor” has 20 mm less aperture than the thing it replaced. If you’ve spent any time reading telescope forums, that sentence should make you flinch, because aperture is the one number those forums agree on. The question I keep getting emailed: does a 30 mm smart telescope give up too much from a light-polluted balcony, and should you hunt down a used S50 instead? ...

The edge-on lens-shaped galaxy NGC 4526 with a single bright point of light, Type Ia supernova 1994D, standing out at its lower-left edge, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope.

AI × astronomy

About 30 LLM agents did a cosmology project with no human in the loop

You give it a sentence — “measure the cosmological parameters from this supernova dataset” — and walk away. About 30 language-model agents pick it up, search the literature, write the analysis code, run it, read the output, argue with each other about whether the answer is sound, and hand back a result. No human touches the keyboard in between. The team that built this calls the demo “a PhD level cosmology task,” and the system did it end to end. ...

Artist's impression of the super-Earth LHS 1140 b as a dark, curved planetary limb rimmed with orange light, lit by its red dwarf star against a field of stars.

Space science

LHS 1140 b is leaking helium — the best evidence yet that a habitable-zone world kept its air

For almost a decade, the most closely watched rocky planet in the exoplanet catalogue has been LHS 1140 b: a super-Earth in the habitable zone of a quiet red dwarf about 48 light-years away, in the constellation Cetus. The open question was never whether it exists. We’ve known that since 2017. The question was whether a small planet sitting that close to a red dwarf could hold onto an atmosphere at all. A paper published in Science on July 16 gives the strongest answer yet, and it comes from an unexpected direction: the planet is losing gas. A Harvard-led team caught helium streaming off the top of its atmosphere. That leak, counterintuitively, is the best evidence we have that there’s an atmosphere down there to leak from. ...

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. ...