Astronomy observing tips and guides
Homer Dávila Gutierrez, director of SKYCR.ORG, has identified a gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645 from public data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The object had not been previously reported and is located at a photometric redshift close to 4.4. The preprint is available on arXiv and the manuscript is under review in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.
It’s almost show time. We’re just a few days away now, from the only total solar eclipse of 2026. While eclipses are a surety as the celestial gears of the Universe grind on, there are always a few unknowns leading up to eclipse day. We wrote a recent guide to the upcoming total solar eclipse featuring totality across Greenland, Iceland, the North Atlantic and Spain on August 12th. As that date is now only a few days away, it’s a good time to look at prospects and resources to have at the ready leading up to eclipse day.
You couldn’t ask for a better year for one of the top annual meteor showers. If skies are clear be sure to watch for one of the top skywatching draws of 2026: the August Perseid meteor shower. While the Perseids are a draw on any year, 2026 is special, and has a few things going for it in terms of the Moon phase, peak timing and prospects.
Confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence via radio signals, also called technosignatures, is the cornerstone of radio astronomy. While humanity has been asking since time immemorial whether or not we’re alone in the universe, radio astronomers are at the frontlines trying to tirelessly answer this longstanding question. To accomplish this, they’ve traditionally focused on a specific radio frequency band called the “water hole”, which resides between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. This is due to two water-forming molecules, hydrogen and hydroxyl, emitting these frequencies.
Where will you be on August 12th? Many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ will make the journey to stand in the Moon’s shadow on that fast-approaching Wednesday date. This unique eclipse sees the pencil-thin shadow of our Moon curl around the Earth’s pole, before arcing across Greenland, Iceland and the Iberian peninsula towards a dramatic sunset over the western Mediterranean.
Researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with international collaborators, carried out the first spatially resolved dual-frequency spectral study of the M87 black hole using observations obtained in 2018 with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA).
Combining over 20 years of archival data from Hubble with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has found the first of the "missing" black holes.
A low-number periodic comet is stalking our fair planet this summer, and putting on its best show of several generations. We’re talking about Comet 10P/Tempel. The comet is currently loitering in the early dawn sky, presenting a good target for large binoculars or a small telescope. But act fast, as the comet is taking the plunge southward in August, post-perihelion.
Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable."
The Submillimeter Array's (SMA) new semi-automated alert system demonstrates how the radio interferometer quickly responds to discoveries from space-based telescopes.
Astrophysicists working tirelessly to tackle the growing impact of satellite constellations have pioneered a new ultra-black coating as one possible way to mitigate the problem.
Combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with advanced image-processing techniques to produce the sharpest X-ray view yet of the relativistic jet from M87's supermassive black hole.
An international team involving over ten institutions, with a strong participation from ESO and INAF, has characterised TOI-201 c, the transiting brown dwarf with the longest period for which mass has been measured. The study, published today in Nature, reveals a compact, coplanar system in which the presence of a massive, eccentric object redefines the stability boundaries for the inner planets
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy cluster, called CL0016+1609 or MACS J0018.5+1626, that is very bright at X-ray wavelengths and is one of the most extensively studied clusters at X-ray and radio wavelengths. The X-ray observations of this cluster revealed that it is two clusters merging along our line of sight.
Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have confirmed that two long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) originated from the collapse of neutron stars into black holes.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton may have found a supernova remnant near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. If confirmed as a supernova remnant, the ejected material is moving at about two million miles per hour and is about 1,700 years old.
Found in 2013, Pink Planet was too faint to study with ground-based telescopes. In new study, scientists used JWST and advanced processing methods to obtain its spectrum for the first time. Observations provided some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object atmosphere. Pink Planet could be a giant planet or brown dwarf, so astronomers refer to it as a ‘planetary-mass companion’.
When someone asks me what originally got me interested in space exploration, my answer is always the same - the Hubble Deep Field. That image, taken in 1995, came out when I was in middle school, and had an everlasting impact on my sense of place in the universe. It’s since been improved upon by various other images, and even last week the Hubble team released yet another jaw-dropping image of the galaxy cluster MACS0329-0211 which recaptures some of the magic of that original image, and still provides the same sense of scale that never seems to truly fade once you come to terms with it. While the original Hubble Deep Field was a blind experiment to see what lay in a seemingly empty patch of sky, this new image comes from the targeted Cluster Lensing and Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) program, focusing on the dynamics of a specific massive galaxy cluster.
If you’re like us, you’ve been following the close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in the June dusk sky. Next week, the Moon enters the evening scene, and actually occults (passes in front of) the planet Venus in what promises to be one of the top skywatching events for 2026.
Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.
Universe Today