Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i BBC Sky at Night

JANUARY HIGHLIGHTS Interview: astronaut Mike Massimino Want to learn to live life like an astronaut? The former NASA spacewalker reveals his top tips for success. Sky at Night meets The Infinite Monkey Cage Maggie, Chris and Pete join the BBC science podcast for stargazing, space science and a spot of sidewalk astronomy. Download our observing forms Print out forms to help you keep track of your planetary observations and sketch what you see at the eyepiece. The Virtual Planetarium…

BULLETIN NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed the most distant black hole ever seen with X-rays. Dating fromjust 470 million years after the Big Bang, the find gives strong weight to the theory that supermassive black holes start their lives large in size, rather than growing overtime. The black hole, located in the galaxy UHZ1, was initially found in the infrared by JWST, with later observations from Chandra finding strong X-ray emissions. “We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” says Akos Bogdan from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, who led the study. “We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected.” This magnification…

ISS beyond 2030? The International Space Station (ISS) could stay in orbit beyond its current 2030 end date, NASA has stated. The agency had hoped commercial space stations would be ready to step in by then, allowing the ageing space station to ‘retire’, but NASA has now officially confirmed that the timeline is flexible. Bennu beats target weight NASA has already recovered 70g of asteroid dust from its OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, surpassing its original 60g goal. This isn't the final tally however, as there is still more of the sample, returned from asteroid Bennu in September 2023, to be retrieved. JWST spectra milestone Astronomers have now calculated the distance to over 200 galaxies using spectra taken by JWST in one of its first-ever science images, that of the galaxy…

When NASA's asteroid-investigating spacecraft Lucy flew past its first asteroid, Dinkinesh, on 1 November 2023 it discovered an unexpected boon – a second space rock. Lucy is due to fly past multiple asteroids over the next 12 years. Most of these will be Trojan asteroids, located in the same orbit as Jupiter, but it is due to make a few pitstops along the way as it passes through the asteroid belt. At just 790m across, Dinkinesh was initially considered too small to visit, but was added to the itinerary in January 2023 when the team realised Lucy's trajectory would take it right past the asteroid. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids,” says Hal Levison from the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator…

The last time I wrote for ‘Inside the Sky at Night’, in the May 2022 issue, I spoke about my then-recent mission to Antarctica. I travelled to Concordia Station as a PhD student to install some software on ASTEP (the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets), a 40cm telescope on the Antarctic Plateau. It's been a good 20 months since I returned home. So how has ASTEP been changing the world ever since? In the months after I returned to working in normal temperatures – including gaining my doctorate – I was privileged to lead ASTEP's first planetary discovery paper. The system we discovered was examined as part of the TESS follow-up programme, and is a super-exciting three-planet system with the super-unexciting name of HD 28109. The three planets range from…

Stargazing 2024 Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, 19 January, 5:30pm A science-themed evening for all the family, with planetarium shows, activities like face-painting and rocket-building for the kids and, for adults, tours of the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source and Central Laser Facility to find out what particle accelerators and lasers teach us about space. Free, but booking is essential. bit.ly/3QmLEZM Public open evening Toothill Observatory, Southampton, 5 January, 7:30pm Solent Amateur Astronomers host a public open evening at the Toothill Observatory, giving astro beginners a chance to view Andromeda and Jupiter through the observatory's 14-inch Meade telescope. Free for members, £5 for non-members, children free. solentastro.org Steve Barrett: The End of Everything University of Wolverhampton and on Zoom, 8 January, 7:30pm Wolverhampton Astronomical Society presents a fascinating lecture by Dr…

The planets tease us early in 2024, when initially well-placed Jupiter and Uranus eventually succumb to evening twilight in March. The other superior planets are lost in the Sun's glare. Morning Venus heads back towards the Sun at the start of 2024, lost from view in March. However, as we head into spring the planets are rather poor. In May, it's unlikely you'll see any planet with the naked eye. If planets are your thing, it may be best to get some rest in the first half of the year because the second half of 2024 will be planetary heaven. Saturn reappears, approaching 30° altitude when due south and appearing quite edge-on through the eyepiece. This causes interesting interactions with its largest moon Titan at the end of 2024. Saturn…

This August and September will see the latest launch window to Mars, an opportunity that comes around once every two years to send a mission to the Red Planet. This year several missions are taking advantage, but rather than focusing on the surface of the planet, they will look towards what happens above it. NASA's Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE) spacecraft will launch this year, set to enter into orbit in September 2025. The mission will consist of two spacecraft, orbiting and working in tandem to better understand how the planet's atmosphere and magnetosphere interact, both with each other and with the solar wind to guide the flow of particles and energy around the planet. One key area of study will be how the solar wind may…

NASA is returning to the Moon. By the end of the decade, the agency hopes to set the first woman and first person of colour on the lunar surface, and this year it takes another step towards this new giant leap with its Artemis II mission. If the mission runs to schedule it will launch in November, with a crew consisting of commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch from NASA, all of whom will be making their second spaceflights. They will be joined by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, making his first flight. The flight will mark the first time a crew has flown aboard either the Space Launch System (SLS) or the Orion crew capsule. Initially, the crew will conduct a 90-minute orbit of Earth,…

 1. The Stream Let's start the tour 6° to the west of mag. +3.3Mu (μ) Leporis, where you'll find the orange mag. +5.0 60 Eridani at the north of a 4.5° chain of stars. Follow the chain through yellow 59 and 58 Eridani, via a white star, to the reddish mag. +4.3 54 Eridani, the brightest star in the group. On a transparent night, see how many fainter stars you can see, especially near the top of the chain.  SEEN IT 2. Iota and RX Leporis Nearly 4° south of mag. +0.3 Rigel (Beta (β) Orionis) lies mag. +4.5 Iota (ι) Leporis, a brilliant-white star that contrasts beautifully with the fainter reddish star RX Leporis that lies 0.25° to the west of it. RX Leporis is slightly variable, oscillating…

In a distant corner of the Universe, some 45 million lightyears away, billions of stars are dancing a celestial waltz. They are spinning, gyrating and pirouetting around and, if you squint, their collective flailing looks like the antennae of an insect. It is from this striking appearance that this ancient group of stars gets its name: the Antennae Galaxies. The plural is a clue to their true origin. This is not a single galaxy, but two in the process of merging. Galaxy mergers like these are the lifeblood of the Universe, building the enormous structures that dominate the cosmos to this day. More than that, galaxy collisions and mergers could have helped make the Universe a more life-friendly place. It isn't too much of stretch to say that we wouldn't…

If you wish to capture celestial bodies within our own Solar System, there are cameras dedicated to the task. Planetary cameras are video cameras configured to perform at high frame rates, often hundreds of frames per second. Planets are the astronomy targets most susceptible to atmospheric ‘seeing’ – conditions caused by weather and pollution. Poor seeing conditions are obvious; when capturing video or looking through an eyepiece, the planet will wobble and dance around the field of view. On nights of good seeing, the object is more stable and detailed. A standard camera's frame capture will be sluggish for these fast-moving distortions in the atmosphere, and images will be soft or blurry. High-frame-rate captures, however, cut through the atmospheric disturbance and sharpen planetary images. For the same reason, they're great…

Ask any astronomer to name the most famous variable star in the sky and many will say Algol, the eclipsing binary in Perseus whose variations were first reported in 1670 by the Italian astronomer Geminiano Montanari. Algol is clearly visible in the evening at this time of year, dropping to one-third of its usual brightness every 2.87 days for 10 hours as it is partially eclipsed by a fainter companion before returning to normal. Ask that same astronomer what Algol represents and the answer is likely to be ‘the winking eye of Medusa’, the ugly Gorgon slain by the Greek hero Perseus in one of the most famous stories of ancient mythology. But is this true? To find out, let's go back to the star catalogue compiled by the ancient…

The Pleiades or Seven Sisters, also known as M45, is one of the most iconic open clusters in the night sky. Found northwest of Orion's Belt (up and right as seen from the UK), the Pleiades are around 444 lightyears distant or approximately three times further away than the more spread-out form of the V-shaped Hyades open cluster. The relative compactness of the Pleiades is a result of it being both a young cluster and further away than the Hyades. Being a young cluster, the Pleiades are hot, blue stars, another factor which aids their visibility. The main pattern appears like a box with a handle. The stars forming this pattern are all named, the brightest also carrying the Bayer designation Eta (η) Tauri. For a photograph of the Pleiades…

VITAL STATS • Price £1,798 • Optics Triplet apo refractor • Aperture 60mm and 80mm • Focal length 360mm or 500mm • Focuser Dual-speed Crayford with 360° rotator • Extras Reducer, flattener and extender, tube rings and dovetail • Weight 2.86kg or 3.5kg, depending on lens used • Supplier First Light Optics • Email questions@firstlightoptics.com • www.firstlightoptics.com It's rare to see modular astrographs on the market, so we were curious about the latest addition to the Askar family: the Askar V modular telescope, an optical tube assembly (OTA) with interchangeable lenses. This standard kit offers us both a 60mm (‘V60’) and an 80mm (‘V80’) triplet refractor option, plus the opportunity to change between these two focal Ilengths during a single imaging session. The Askar V comes with a field flattener,…

EYE ON THE SKY EUCLID, 7 NOVEMBER 2023 In November, ESA scientists unveiled the first scientific images sent back by the Euclid mission. The five images included the shots seen here of the Horsehead Nebula (main image), spiral galaxy IC 342 (top left) and the Perseus galaxy cluster Abel 426 (top right). Euclid aims to discover more about dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is designed to capture widefield images of vast regions of the night sky – as opposed to focusing on small, specific areas, as the James Webb Space Telescope does – at a higher resolution than was possible using previous survey telescopes, such as the ground-based VLT Survey Telescope. Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral on the back of a Falcon 9 rocket on 1 July 2023…

An unusual near-Earth asteroid could once have been part of the Moon, according to a new study. Kamo‘oalewa is a quasi-Earth satellite, meaning it appears to orbit the Earth but is actually orbiting the Sun. Such orbits are rare and generally only last a few decades, but Kamo‘oalewa will remain stable for millions of years. The unusual orbit led astronomers to take a spectra of the rock, finding its composition was more like that of the Moon than an asteroid. A team of planetary geologists wondered if the asteroid was a lunar fragment chipped off by a meteor. They created a set of computer simulations that showed it was rare, but possible, for an impact to have enough energy to put an asteroid into a quasi-satellite orbit without ejecting it…

Solar Cycle races to peak Our current round of rising and falling solar activity, Solar Cycle 25, looks set to peak sooner and higher than expected, according to new predictions from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. It is now estimated the peak will fall between January and October 2024, with a peak sunspot number between 137 and 173. Refuelling satellite The UK Space Agency is funding research into building a refuelling satellite which would be able to revive other spacecraft in orbit, helping combat space junk. The agency has provided a £2 million investment for a feasibility study and looking for opportunities for a commercial satellite. New depths to Cassini Lancaster University PhD student George Xystouris has shown it's possible to use the shadow of Saturn's rings to measure…

Our experts examine the hottest new research CUTTING EDGE In many of the exoplanet systems that we've discovered so far, the innermost planets orbit scorchingly tightly to their suns – often within only a few stellar radii. Some are so close that they're effectively embedded within the rarefied upper atmosphere of the star itself – the corona. Such close-in planets would be expected to significantly interact with the star's magnetic field, so much so that they could even trigger solar flares. Ekaterina Ilin and her colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany have completed the largest systematic search for just such occurrences. Flares – short-lived but intense increases in stellar brightness – are caused by the sudden release of energy from the contorted magnetic field of the…

Horizons: A 21st-Century Space Odyssey Various UK venues, January–March Professor Brian Cox's arena show ‘Horizons: A 21st-Century Space Odyssey’ sold out large venues around the world in 2023, and now he's bringing it on home with a string of shows in Britain and Northern Ireland from January through to the end of March. After kicking off with five nights at London's Richmond Theatre on 16–20 January, the tour moves across to Northern Ireland for the rest of the month, with shows at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast (24 January), the Millennium Forum, Derry/Londonderry (25 January), City Hotel in Armagh (26 January) and the Diamond Hall in Coleraine (27 January). Ticket prices start at £44. briancoxlive.co.uk…

The Solar System dominates 2024, but not always in an obvious way. At the beginning of the year, Jupiter and Uranus rule the roost early evening, the rest lost to the Sun's glare. They begin to lose altitude as darkness falls through February, becoming very low towards the end of March. After this, the major planets will be off the menu for several months. Balance is restored in unusual form with a number of interesting and bright comets on view. A ‘bright comet’ typically means an object visible through binoculars or a small telescope. There are currently also two potentially naked-eye comets in 2024, one dim and one possibly not so dim! Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through orbital debris from a comet, and the first major display of…

October's highlight will be comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS. Whether it becomes bright enough to be viewed with the naked eye or even bright enough to be a spectacle remains to be seen, but the anticipation will be palpable. The best times to observe this comet from the UK will be in October evening skies, where post-perihelion it may put on something of a show, but then again it may not! The bright planets will definitely be spectacular in the autumn and well presented for UK observation. The inner Solar System also begins to join in, Venus slowly but surely edging into the evening twilight sky. We're fairly accustomed to the four Galilean moons of Jupiter interacting with their host planet, events that we often mention in the magazine's monthly Sky…

Over a decade after work began on the top of the Cerro Pachón ridge in Chile, the final touches are now being placed on the next great astronomical tool, the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Once complete, Rubin's 8.4m telescope and 3,200-megapixel camera will be large enough to fit 40 full Moons in a single frame. It will use this huge capacity to survey the entire sky once every three to four days for at least 10 years. These frequent, high-quality maps will be vital for tracking down supernovae, asteroids and all other manner of transient objects and events. In addition, this decade of data will create a map deep enough to uncover up to 20 billion new galaxies and a similar number of stars, creating a more complete catalogue of…

BEST TIME TO SEE: As shown 1. Curtiss's Cross (4 Jan, 01:20 UT) 2. Gruithuisen's Lunar City (4 Jan, 05:20 UT) 3. Face in Albategnius (18 Jan, 18:10 UT) 4. Nessie (18 Jan, 19:55 UT) 5. Stars of Aristillus (19 Jan, 00:04 UT) 6. Eyes of Clavius (19 Jan, 15:50 UT daylight) 7. Plato's Hook (19 Jan, 21:00 UT) 8. Jewelled Handle (21 Jan, 01:28 UT) 9. Zeno Steps (27 Jan, 05:50 UT) A lunar clair-obscur effect is a trick of the light that appears as something familiar or unusual through the eyepiece. They provide interesting targets which can help you explore and familiarise yourself with the Moon's surface. On 4 January, Curtiss's Cross makes an appearance. Best seen around 01:20 UT, the cross can be tricky to see, but…

Jupiter Best time to see: 1 January, 19:40 UT Altitude: 49° Location: Aries Direction: South Features: Complex atmosphere, Galilean moons Recommended equipment: 75mm or larger telescope Jupiter is well placed at the start of January, able to reach its highest altitude under dark-sky conditions. Shining at mag. –2.4, the planet presents a disc full of detail with an apparent diameter of 43 arcseconds. A small telescope shows it as a slightly oval disc, the gas giant's rapid spin – completing one rotation about its axis in slightly under 10 hours – causing it to bulge at its equator, producing the oblate shape seen through the eyepiece. Small scopes will also reveal larger banding within Jupiter's atmosphere, most notably the North Equatorial Belt (NEB) and South Equatorial Belt (SEB), A 100mm…

A poor start to 2024 in terms of the planets is offset by a good display of bright comets, that is, comets that are brighter than, or on the threshold of, binocular observation. An excellent example is 144P/Kushida, which is travelling along a path that will take it from a location 2° south of mag. +5.8 Uranus on 1 January towards the Hyades open cluster by the end of the month. Extend this through into February and the comet will appear to move across the cluster. You can find more about where the comet is going to be and how to spot it on page 47. The next perihelion date for 144P/Kushida will be on 25 January 2024, when it is expected to brighten to around ninth magnitude. The comet…

With Jupiter well placed for observation, there's great opportunity to catch some of the planet's interactions with its moons. This month's challenge is to observe or image as many different types as you can. A freeware application such as WinJUPOS (jupos.org/gh/download.htm) can be used to determine when these events will occur. Jupiter has many moons, but only four are large and bright enough to be seen easily through a telescope. As they orbit Jupiter, Earth gets to view various interactions between them and the planet's globe. A common event is a transit, which is when a moon appears to cross Jupiter's disc. The point of first contact at the start of the event is called transit ingress, abbreviated as TrI. The point of last contact is known as transit egress…

Our ideas about what happens when galaxies collide include their central supermassive black holes merging. But astronomers encounter an issue when they try to model exactly how this occurs. In order to spiral towards one another, the two black holes must first shed energy. To start with, that energy is transferred to surrounding material, including gas and dust. Except when they get within a parsec of each other – just over three lightyears – it seems there's no longer enough ‘stuff’ to shed energy to. This has become known as the Final Parsec Problem. There must be solution, and recent experiments such as NANOGrav have picked up a lot of gravitational waves that look like they come from colliding supermassive black holes. There's clearly something we are missing in our…

Camera technology is a key feature of many smartphones today, and their performance in low-light conditions has improved significantly. Because they're portable, smartphones are an excellent route into night-sky imaging, although with a fixed lens they don't offer the flexibility of other cameras. Depending on the model, smartphones perform best for widefield Milky Way images, some lunar imaging or capturing the Northern Lights. What type of images can be taken with your smartphone? It depends on whether it can capture long exposures. Some have this feature built in – often contained in a ‘night mode’ function – meaning it's possible to take widefield Milky Way images. The length of night-mode exposures is limited to 30 seconds, which isn't as long as is possible with a DSLR, but long enough for…

It would take six centuries for western astronomers to make note of Algol after al-Sūfī's observations, and none of these early depictions showed it as Medusa's eye. In 1603, German astronomer Johann Bayer published his star atlas Uranometria, labelling Algol as Beta Persei. On his illustrated chart of Perseus, Bayer followed al-Sūfī's portrayal, placing Algol on Medusa's temple next to her right eye, and not on it (see Figure 2). The first astronomer recorded as noting Algol's variability was Montanari in 1670. It was only the second-known variable star, 30 years after the brightness of Mira in Cetus was found to also fluctuate. However, it seems that initially this fact was either not known or not accepted, as when John Flamsteed, the first British Astronomer Royal, created his star atlas,…

If you image Venus using a narrow band of infrared light centred around a wavelength of 1,010nm, the planet's normally completely opaque atmosphere becomes almost totally transparent. In the nightside region, away from the dazzlingly bright day side, you can then ‘see’ the hot surface of the planet, with features that are at higher elevation being cooler and darker. Capturing an image of the thermal night side of Venus is a challenge for amateur planetary imagers, mainly due to its low surface brightness and proximity to the much, much brighter day-side crescent. Harder still is imaging the real darker features present there. Despite the difficulties, if you are familiar with standard planetary imaging and like a challenge, you can successfully capture this detail with your telescope. If possible, you should…

BULLETIN When two dead stars were hurled from their host galaxy, it resulted in one of the biggest stellar collisions ever seen. After first being spotted in March 2023, follow-up observations have now revealed that the event was a kilonova, leading to the creation of some of the rarest elements in the Universe. The explosion, now known as GRB 230307A, was first observed as a flurry of gamma rays by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. It was the second-most powerful burst ever recorded, roughly 1,000 times brighter than most gamma-ray bursts, and lasted for a minute rather than the usual two seconds. The world's premier telescopes raced to observe the event, finding it originated 120,000 lightyears from the nearest galaxy, suggesting the stars responsible had been hurled from their original…

The land of the dinosaurs could be easier to spot than a planet of modern-day humans, a new study has found. When searching for potentially inhabited worlds, astronomers look for various chemical imbalances in the atmosphere that are only possible with the help of biological processes. For instance, Earth's atmosphere currently contains 20 per cent oxygen and only traces of carbon dioxide. Without plant life breaking down carbon dioxide and releasing it as oxygen this ratio would be very different, meaning a distant observer could potentially use this ratio to identify our planet's habitability. The level of oxygen in our atmosphere hasn't remained constant in the last 540 million years that large complex creatures have roamed its surface, however. A team of astronomers investigating which era might be the most…

Astronomy is a source of inspiration for many, but for me it's an antidote to making music. Music is so subjective: you could just keep going and keep asking Is this right or wrong? Is this good or bad?’. But then astronomy is all very objective. When I was studying astronomy at the Open University, I loved the maths, the problem-solving and getting a concrete answer at the end. You don't always get that with music. The special thing about astronomy for me is that it combines that objectivity with something very romantic, very mysterious. I got particularly interested in the comets part of the degree because there's something so romantic to me about those little visitors that arrive and say ‘hi’ every once in a while and then disappear…

Shining at mag. +7.2 in early January, 62P/Tsuchinshan passes from Leo into Virgo. It dims to eighth magnitude at the start of February and ninth by the end, but has the virtue of moving very slowly against the background stars. Ninthmagnitude 144P/Kushida is a really well-placed evening comet; starting just south of Uranus, it passes across the Hyades during February. Then at the end of March, mag. +8.3 C/2021 S3 PanSTARRS will cross the Coathanger Cluster. Comet 12P/Pons–Brooks is an early evening comet in March, skirting the twilight after sunset later in the month. Passing from Andromeda through northern Pisces and into Aries, it may become a dim naked-eye object. In the autumn, there's C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS. This will swing through perihelion on 27 September and is best seen from…

Astronomically, the first half of 2024 will be fairly leisurely, with several bright comets as the highlight. As we enter the second half of the year, there's a change of pace. The planets start to reappear, providing an early-hours spectacle in Taurus. Here you'll have Mars, Jupiter and Uranus arranged near the bright naked-eye open clusters of the Pleiades and Hyades. The passage of the waning crescent Moon through the area will produce an amazing pre-dawn scene at the end of July. The mornings of 30 and 31 July are definitely dates to put in your calendar if you have a camera! This could be taken to another level if there's a late noctilucent cloud display in the region too. Dwarf planet Ceres reaches opposition on 6 July, shining at…

The Moon has had something of a renaissance in the last decade, with more nations and even private companies setting their sights on its grey surface. Whereas missions in the 1960s and ‘70s focused on the well-lit equator and the relative safety of the lunar near side, these new missions are set for a more challenging time. Around May, the Chinese space agency plans to send its Chang'e 6 sample-return mission to the Moon's far side. Its landing site is in the South Pole–Aitken Basin, a 2,500km-diameter, 8km-deep impact crater formed over four billion years ago. Over its 53-day mission, Chang'e 6 will use a drill to bring up soil samples from up to 2m below the surface. These will then be stowed in an ascent vehicle, launched into orbit…

Here on Earth, where there's water, there's life, but is that true elsewhere in the Solar System? It's thought that one of Jupiter's icy moons, Europa, is home to a subsurface ocean of liquid water that could potentially be home to some kind of microbial life. This year, NASA plans to send its Europa Clipper spacecraft to thoroughly investigate the moon and determine how likely it is that life might be hiding under the ice. The spacecraft will map the moon inside and out. Using its cameras and spectrometers it will create a detailed atlas of the entire surface, looking for signs of organic chemicals that could form the building blocks of life, as well as gaining a better understanding of the geological processes that shape the moon's face. Meanwhile,…

The constellation of Perseus depicts the Greek hero who decapitated the Gorgon Medusa. The rather gory end for Medusa is marked by the star Algol. Known as the Demon Star, it's an eclipsing binary system, its regular dips in brightness representing Medusa's winking eye. Algol lies 93 lightyears from the Sun and, for the majority of the time, shines at mag. +2.1. However, at regular intervals Algol appears to dip in brightness to mag. +3.4. The cause of the dip is well known, happening when a dimmer companion star eclipses its brighter primary. Eclipses occur at regular intervals of two days, 20 hours and 49 minutes, each lasting for 9.6 hours. This superb example of an eclipsing binary is an easy variable star to observe and a popular target to…

Most galaxy collisions happen at a safe distance in far-flung corners of the Universe. Yet there's one collision that will one day happen considerably closer to home, with potentially important consequences for life on Earth. Our nearest neighbouring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, currently sits 2.5 million lightyears away. But the operative word is currently. The gap between Andromeda and the Milky Way is closing at a rate of 300 kilometres per second. In around 4.5 billion years’ time they will be very close to one another. Astronomers thought the two galaxies were destined for a head-on collision, but data from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft suggests the encounter will be more of a glancing blow, the crucial factor being the effect the nearby Triangulum Galaxy has upon Andromeda's motion.…

VITAL STATS • Price £519 (Deluxe) • Optics Wide-angle and telephoto lenses • Aperture 24mm • Focal length 100mm • Equivalent focal length 48mm (wide) f/2.4,675mm (tele) f/4.2 • Sensor Sony IMX415 Starvis • Extras Carry case, micro SD card and adaptor, two ND filters, UHC filter, magnetic filter holder, extra battery • Connectivity Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 5GHz • Weight 1.2kg • Supplier 365 Astronomy • Tel 020 3384 5187 • www.365astronomy.com Smart telescopes – telescopes that can automatically track the sky and take images of deep-sky targets, the Moon and, to a lesser extent, the planets – have exploded in popularity in the last few years. Here we take a look at the Dwarf II from Dwarflab, a diminutive package with a lot of promise, according to the publicity…

What does your role at Ames Research Center involve? I work on the research and development of robotics technology for NASA. There's a large R&D team here at NASA Ames, most of whom are working on the 2024 VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) lunar rover mission that's going to be operating near the lunar south pole. We've done a lot of research in the past with planetary rovers, taking these out into the field to develop new techniques and technologies for future planetary missions. Why is it important to test rovers? There's a saying across NASA that is core to the engineering of space missions: “test as you fly”. We want our systems to be tested in the most realistic, highest-fidelity-possible way so that we're not surprised when we…