This might be controversial but if you heard about the incredible planet parade occurring on 25th of January, we have some great news for you…. Social media is buzzing with the news of a “once in 396 billion years” planetary alignment on Saturday, January 25th. We are going to answer the questions: What is a...
Discovered on the 18th of March, nova Cas 2021 was shining at approx magnitude +9.6, but it has quickly brightened to magnitude +7.5 over the weekend. Nova Cas 2021 should be visible through a pair of 10 x 50 binoculars or a small telescope and is set to be a great target for professional and...
A new virtual festival is being organised this February to celebrate Northumberland as one of the best places to stargaze and take in the majesty of the Milky Way on a clear night. Officially, Northumberland has ‘the most pristine dark skies in England’ and in 2013 the National Park and most of Kielder Water and...
Comets are (essentially) massive dirty, icy snowballs thought to mostly originate from the “Oort Cloud” at the far reaches of the solar system. 2,000 to 200,000 AU distant from the sun, this great big spherical(ish) cloud of objects, leftovers from the creation of our solar system, bimble about minding their own business, until a passing...
The 2020 Noctilucent Cloud (NLC) season is almost here – NLCs are they the highest clouds on Earth (in the Mesosphere) and occur when ice crystals seed onto the ashes of shooting stars. There’s also a growing body of evidence linking the appearance and extent of these clouds to Global Warming, for example they seem...
Satellite spotting is definitely a fun astronomical thing to do and because commercial launches are now happening on a weekly basis, spotting satellites is easy enough. You may have already seen the International Space Station flying across the sky but have you seen any Starlink satellites? The answer is possibly a yes – many stargazers...
One of the best things about being involved in Battlesteads Observatory is stargazing under the wonderful dark skies that we have; light pollution is the bane of any astronomer’s life and it’s also not great for an ever increasingly large number of species of animals and insects. That being said – when the moon is...
This meteor show is one of the high points of the “Shooting Star” year and can produce prolific displays of between 40-300 shooting stars at the peak, which starts tonight and goes on into the morning of tomorrow the 4th if January. On average it produces about 120 per hour and these are usually faint...
Its New Years Eve 2019 and we’ve got a whole lot of stargazing in store for you in 2020! Hopefully we’ll get through 101 things by this time next year and you’ll have joined us in observing a few of them. In the meantime – head to the internet, or Google Play or the Apple...
I’ve had this idea for a book for a while now – a bucket list of objects in the sky that I think everyone should try to spot before you shuffle off and your energy rejoins the universe. I’ve never been immodest enough to think that a) I could write a book and b) people...