Observing

A line of evenly spaced Starlink satellites crossing a deep-blue twilight sky above the painted town hall on Tübingen's market square

Beginner stargazing

Plane, satellite or space station? How to identify a moving light in the night sky

A point of light is sliding across the sky, silently, and you want to know what it is. You can almost always answer that in about ten seconds with four checks. Look at whether it blinks, whether it moves in a dead-straight line at an even pace, whether it fades out in the middle of the sky, and how long it lasts. No gear needed, and a free pass-prediction website will confirm your guess afterwards. The key below is the one I use from my balcony in Nicosia; the sections after it explain each line. ...

Oblique Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter view of McGetchin crater, a fresh 222-metre crater on grey lunar plains surrounded by a bright starburst of ejecta rays

Space news

McGetchin crater: the Moon took a 15-kiloton hit in 2024 and nobody saw the flash

Sometime between 11 April and 22 May 2024, something the size of a three-to-six-storey building slammed into the eastern side of the Moon’s near side and blew out a crater 222 m across and 43 m deep. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the aftermath within weeks, but nobody noticed until 2025, and the results only went public this month. The crater, now named McGetchin, is the largest fresh impact crater ever documented anywhere in the Solar System. It released roughly 15 kilotons of TNT-equivalent energy, and no telescope on Earth recorded the flash. ...

Neptune imaged by NASA's Voyager 2 in 1989 — a deep-blue disc marked by the dark oval of the Great Dark Spot and streaks of white, high-altitude methane-ice cloud.

Celestial event

Neptune at opposition, September 26: how to find the most distant planet

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. ...

The tilted spiral galaxy NGC 7331 with a golden central bulge, blue-white spiral arms and dark dust lanes, three smaller background galaxies scattered across the star field above it

Celestial event

SN 2026aaiv: a Type Ia supernova is brightening in NGC 7331, and how to see it

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. ...

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

Gear

Collimating a Dobsonian after the drive: the two tools that matter

Every time I load the 8-inch Dob into the back of the car and drive the hour up to Troodos, it arrives out of collimation. Not badly (the mirror doesn’t slide across the cell), but enough that a defocused star at 200× shows the diffraction rings piled up on one side instead of sitting concentric. On an f/6 tube that costs me a sliver of sharpness on Saturn; on a faster f/4 it would gut the whole view. Before I look at anything, I spend ninety seconds putting the optics back into line. This is that routine: what collimation actually is, the two tools worth carrying, the one trick that makes a cheap laser trustworthy, and the star test that tells you when you’re done. ...

A crescent Moon with faint earthshine at right, the overexposed point of Venus at center, and Earth's blue atmospheric limb at lower left, photographed from the ISS

Celestial event

Venus hits its brightest for 2026 on September 18 — catch it low in the west now

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. ...

A waxing gibbous Moon through a telescope, craters and mountains thrown into sharp relief along the terminator, the day–night line running down the left of the disc.

Beginner stargazing

Moon phases, explained: how the lunar cycle sets your dark-sky nights

The single biggest thing standing between you and a good night under the stars isn’t your gear, your location, or even the weather. It’s the Moon. A full Moon can raise the brightness of the whole sky enough to erase the Milky Way, wash out every meteor fainter than a fireball, and flatten a galaxy into a grey smudge. A week later the same sky, from the same spot, with the same eyes, shows all of it. Nothing changed but the phase. ...

Silhouette of an amateur astronomer beside a Newtonian reflector telescope against deep-blue desert twilight.

Gear

How to keep dew off your telescope: shields, heater straps, and when you need them

Somewhere in the next few weeks the first properly damp night of autumn will cut an observing session short, and it won’t be cloud that does it. A film of water forms on the front of the telescope, the stars go soft, then milky, then gone, and you spend twenty minutes with a battery hairdryer wondering where the sky went. That’s dew, and it’s the most avoidable way to lose a clear night. Here’s what forms it, what stops it, and where you can stop spending — because the cheapest fix is often enough, and some of you don’t need to buy anything at all. ...

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. ...

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. ...