Innehållsförteckning för February 2025 från BBC Sky at Night

A nearby supernova could potentially end the search for dark matter according to a new study, provided astronomers don't miss it. The study looked at one of the leading candidates for dark matter, a hypothetical particle known as the axion. These are thought to be created during the first 10 seconds of a supernova explosion. The intense magnetic field converts some of the axions into gamma rays, creating a burst that can be seen from Earth. By studying these gamma rays, astronomers would be able to measure the axion's mass. “We'd be able to determine everything we need to know about the axion, and we'd be incredibly confident in the signal because there's no ordinary matter which could create such an event,” says Benjamin Safdi from the University of California,…

When I last wrote about NASA's Lucy mission, we were waiting for it to launch, beginning its journey to three main-belt asteroids (the ones between Mars and Jupiter) before reaching its eight primary targets, the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. The Trojans are previously unexplored asteroids which lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit. They are remnants of planet formation and likely hold clues to how our Solar System evolved. Lucy lifted off on a beautiful clear morning on 16 October 2021. Since then, it's been on quite an adventure. While the launch was perfect, it quickly became apparent that the deployment of Lucy's 7-metre-diameter (23ft) solar panels was not. While Lucy had one fully opened solar panel that was latched and rigid, the other didn't open all the way. 'Floppy' is…

Hollywood's greatest sci-fi blockbusters have taken us to the stars, introduced alien worlds and imagined humanity's future in the cosmos. But how often do they get the science right? In the rush to thrill and entertain, filmmakers often sacrifice realism for dramatic effect. From explosive sound in the vacuum of space to impossibly fast interstellar travel, these cinematic liberties stretch – and sometimes break – the boundaries of actual science. Here we take a look at six common mistakes that Hollywood makes about space science, unravelling the truth behind the fiction. What would really happen if there was a fire in space? Is warp speed actually possible? And could you have a punch-up in zero gravity? Get ready for science to set the record straight, proving that reality can be…

If there's one thing sci-fi writers love, it's a single-biome planet. There's the water world Kamino in Star Wars, desert planets like Arrakis from Dune and the forest planet Kashyyyk that's home to the Wookie species. Unlike Earth, which is made up of different biomes, these planets are characterised by their homogeneity. Their landscapes can resemble other planets known to exist, like the arid, cold deserts of Mars, the 'ice planets' Uranus and Neptune, and the hellishly hot, volcanic world Venus, cloaked in clouds of sulphuric acid. Of course, there is no evidence yet of life on any of the other planets in our Solar System. It's likely that this is exactly why there is such consistency in their landscape, because the evolution of life here on Earth has impacted…

Space is… big. Any story that involves characters traversing it needs to come up with a way to address the vast distances between galaxies. There are a few ways that sci-fi writers get around this problem of moving their protagonists from one point in space to another, including teleportation, wormholes and faster-than-light travel. Travelling at the speed of light – around 300,000km (186,000 miles) per second – would allow you to circumnavigate Earth 7.5 times in a single second and get you to the surface of the Sun in a little over 8 minutes. But if you wanted to visit Earth's nearest neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri, some 40,000 billion kilometres away, your journey would take just under 4 years and 3 months. If faster-than-light travel was an option, though,…

During a total solar eclipse in 1919, British physicist Arthur Eddington famously confirmed Einstein's prediction that light rays are bent ever so slightly in a gravitational field. This phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing due to its ability to focus or disperse light much like a lens, has since been observed many times, particularly in Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope images. In these, the light of remote galaxies can be strongly amplified and distorted into elongated arcs by the gravity of a foreground galaxy or cluster. Gravitational lensing is the result of the warping of spacetime by massive objects. In the case of black holes, the effect can even be so strong as to cause light rays to orbit the black hole. In fact, a black hole itself is an…

PICK OF THE MONTH Venus Best time to see: 1 February, 1 hour after sunset  Altitude: 28°  Location: Pisces Direction: Southwest Features: Phase, subtle atmospheric markings Recommended equipment: 75mm scope or larger Beautiful Venus grabs the early-evening attention during February, a sparkling jewel visible soon after the Sun has set, or indeed before, if you know where to look. Once the Sun sets and twilight begins to darken, under clear skies Venus really pops into view. At the start of February, it's possible to see it shining at mag. –4.5 against a totally dark sky. On 1 February, Venus sets 4 hours and 24 minutes after the Sun. A 13%-lit waxing crescent Moon sits 3.3° to the south of Venus at 20:00 UT. Through the eyepiece, Venus appears 32 arcseconds across as a…

Blanchinus Type: Crater Size: 68km Longitude/latitude: 2.5° E, 25.3° S Age: Older than 3.9 billion years Best time to see: First quarter (5–6 February) or six days after full Moon (19–20 February) Minimum equipment: 50mm telescope If you're a fan of observing the Moon, you might have seen crater Blanchinus without even realising it. That's because it's one of the craters that contributes to forming the famous clair-obscur effect known as the Lunar X. The partially illuminated rims of Blanchinus, 68km La Caille and 118km Purbach together form the 'X' near to the first quarter phase. As a stand-alone crater, Blanchinus is less impressive as its ancient form has been heavily eroded. La Caille to the northwest is a good comparison, because despite having a similar age, it appears much cleaner-cut, with a well-defined rim…

1. M50 We start this month's tour with M50, one of several open clusters we'll visit this month. An easy way to find this lovely cluster is to navigate just over 5° north-northeast from mag. –1.1 Sirius (Alpha (α) Canis Majoris) to the mag. +4.0 star Theta (θ) Canis Majoris, then continue another 4° in the same direction. You'll see M50 as a circular glow about half the apparent diameter of the Moon. M50 lies 3,200 lightyears away and spans approximately 20 lightyears. □ SEEN IT 2. M46 and M47 This contrasting pair of clusters lie together in the same field of view, 5° to the south of mag. +3.9 Alpha (α) Monocerotis. You should easily be able to resolve over half a dozen stars in M47. M46 is over…

Artificial intelligence or AI is a term heard everywhere these days. Its application is exciting, confusing and very often misunderstood, so let's start by defining exactly what AI is and what it does. AI is essentially a computer-based tool that has the ability to learn and apply results to data processing. Unlike a conventional computer program, AI can – when given the right guidance – make more considered choices, emulating how a human would approach a task. But the 'intelligence' in AI doesn't mean that AI systems are self-aware or intelligent in the way we are. An AI system can't operate without direction and this is provided in the form of models or neural networks trained using a dataset relevant to the subject. These models are typically produced by processes…

Modern telescopes are capable of providing much more than mere images of distant objects. One of the biggest tools that astronomers use to study the Universe is spectroscopy, the science of splitting light (visible or otherwise) into its component wavelengths, known as a spectrum. Different materials reflect, absorb and emit light at characteristic wavelengths. This means that the object that emitted the light, plus any gas the light travels through and any surface it reflects off, all imprint a signature on the spectrum. We can study this signature to understand the properties of planets, stars, galaxies and nebulae. Instruments that split light like this are called spectroscopes or spectrographs, with the resulting spectrum typically plotted as the light's intensity against wavelength. These instruments can make use of a prism, whereby…

Step 1 Complete the 'Equipment' and 'User' profiles under SGPro's 'Tools' menu. The User profile is for details of your imaging site and the Equipment option has individual tabs for details of each item of equipment being used. Save both profiles for future use. Step 2 Use the 'Framing & Mosaic Wizard' to choose a target, then add your image scale and sensor size. It's worth checking before using the wizard that your intended target is in your field of view. For this, the free software Stellarium is ideal. Step 3 Fill in the details of the subframes you'd like in the 'Sequencer' menu, including the exposure time and number of exposures. If you're using filters, repeat the entries for each. Finally, in the Directory section specify where to save…

VITAL STATS • Price £849 • Optics Petzval four-element (two-element FPL53 ED glass objective; two-element corrector) • Aperture 60mm • Focal length 300mm, f/5 • Focuser 2.5-inch dual-speed rack and pinion • Extras Soft carry case, carry handle, dovetail bar • Weight 3.1kg • Supplier First Light Optics • Email questions@firstlightoptics.com • www.firstlightoptics.com Refractors are versatile instruments that can be used for photographing a variety of astronomical objects. Small-aperture fast-focal-ratio refractors really come into their own when we image large, faint objects such as nebulae or large galaxies. StarField Optics' Gear60 is an f/5 telescope boasting Petzval four-element optics, so we were looking forward to seeing how well it stacked up in our tests. The compact refractor arrived in a sturdy box stored in a compact soft carry case with…

CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY/SPITZER SPACE TELESCOPE, 28 OCTOBER 2024 This image of Cygnus OB2, the closest large star cluster to Earth, was created by combining X-ray data with observations from the now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope. The result confirmed something scientists had long suspected: that the protoplanetary discs of smaller stars can be adversely affected by the presence of massive stars nearby. X-rays and UV light coming from such stars can act like a wind, blowing material out of the smaller stars' discs before planets have the chance to form. In regions of Cygnus OB2 with few stars and low radiation, around 40 per cent of young stars had protoplanetary discs; however, in regions with more massive stars and higher radiation, that figure fell to a mere 18 per cent. FREE BONUS…

Despite hopes that Venus may have once had oceans of water, a new study has found that the planet has probably been dry since its creation 4.6 billion years ago. This means it's highly unlikely any Earth-like life evolved on the planet. High levels of volcanic activity ensure Venus is covered in a thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere which insulates the planet. Today, this has increased the temperature to the point where any surface water has long since boiled away, but planetary geologists have postulated that the past climate may have been cooler, allowing oceans to form. To test this, a team of researchers looked at what other gases Venus's volcanoes were pumping into the atmosphere. Here on Earth, volcanic eruptions are mostly steam as our planet's interior is water-rich. On Venus,…

NASA is heading towards a new era after President-elect Donald Trump announced on 4 December 2024 that he'd selected billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman to be the new administrator of NASA. Originally the founding CEO of a payment-processing company and an aerospace defence company, Isaacman has funded and commanded two commercial spaceflights in recent years: Inspiration4, the first completely private space mission, in 2021, and Polaris Dawn in 2024, where Isaacman performed the first commercial spacewalk to test spacesuits created by SpaceX. “I can confidently say this second Space Age has only just begun,” Isaacman said shortly after the Trump announcement. “There will inevitably be a thriving space economy – one that will create opportunities for countless people to live and work in space. At NASA, we will passionately pursue these…

Cosmic rays are high-energy subatomic particles that zip around in outer space. They're accelerated to enormous speeds by astrophysical events like coronal mass ejections on the Sun or supernovae exploding across the Galaxy. When one encounters planet Earth, it soon hits a gas atom high in the atmosphere, creating a burst of other particles which themselves fly forwards to trigger further interactions, until a huge cone-shaped cascade of different particles develops. This cosmic radiation is a hazard not just for astronauts, but also for passengers and aircrew flying high in the atmosphere – especially on routes over the poles, where the protection from the planet's magnetic field is weakest. Much of these 'secondary cascades' are absorbed by the atmosphere, but some of the more penetrating particles do reach Earth's surface,…

Fire can't start in the vacuum of space, as there is no oxygen available for combustion. They can, however, start inside a spacecraft or space station that has oxygenated air for passengers. Any fire in space would look and behave differently than the lit candles on your birthday cake back at home, though, and that's down to gravity. The typical teardrop shape of a burning candle on Earth is caused by the effects of gravity: hotter air is less dense, so it rises to the top of a flame in a peak. This also pulls in cooler, more oxygenated air, keeping the fire going. But in microgravity, the hot air forms a spherical shape around the source of the fire. This limits how hot the fire can get and how…

Most great sci-fi explosions are accompanied by an almighty 'ka-boom!', but you already know that this is only possible in Hollywood space. In reality, an explosion in space would be deathly silent. On Earth, the most damaging part of an explosion is the shock wave it creates in the air. This is when the chemical reaction that makes an explosive material explode creates a highly pressurised, hot gas that expands rapidly, travelling outward from the explosion as a wave of destruction. The shock wave is carried by the particles in the air and will keep going until it loses its energy, giving us the blast radius. But in outer space, there are very few particles. The initial explosion will still involve a high-pressure gas at high temperature, but there won't…

Gravity is a nuisance, don't you think? The gravity of our home planet makes it hard to climb a mountain. It can cause a broken leg if you fall down the stairs. It makes you very much aware of your body mass. And it's the main reason why pigs – or people – don't fly. Wouldn't it be great to experience no gravity? To effortlessly float around in any direction you wish, like astronauts on board the International Space Station? You wouldn't need stairs anymore, or elevators, for that matter. Then again, as every astronaut can tell you, drinking a cup of coffee would become quite a challenge. But it's an interesting thought experiment. What would the world, and indeed the Universe, look like if there were no gravity, if…

Mercury Best time to see: 28 February, from 30 minutes before sunrise Altitude: 8° (low)  Location: Pisces Direction: West Mercury is too close to the Sun in the morning sky to be seen properly at the start of February, reaching superior conjunction on 9 February. After this date it emerges slowly into the evening sky. On 24 February, Mercury sets 1 hour and 10 minutes after the Sun, shines at mag. –1.1 and appears 5 arcseconds across through the eyepiece, with a phase of 87%. Best seen from 30 minutes after sunset at the end of the month, it is quite low. Mercury and Saturn are 1.5° apart on 25 February. Mars Best time to see: 1 February, 22:50 UT Altitude: 63° Location: Gemini Direction: South Mars was at opposition last month and remains well…

Minor planet 29 Amphitrite reaches opposition on 12 February, when it can be found very close to the very recognisable Sickle asterism in Leo. It starts the month 1.5° northwest of mag. +3.5 Eta (η) Leonis, the star immediately north of Regulus (Alpha (α) Leonis). From here it tracks west and slightly north to end the month 4° south of mag. +4.3 Alterf, Lambda (λ) Leonis. On 1 February, 29 Amphitrite shines at mag. +9.5, placing it easily within small-scope territory. Its brightness increases slightly to +9.2 at opposition, then falls back to mag. +9.5 by the end of the month. Its total path length throughout February is just 6.5°. As ever, the best way to identify a minor planet is to photograph or sketch the area it's supposed to…

There are a lot of asteroids in the Solar System, plenty of which are visible through small telescopes. It's therefore unsurprising that some will, from time to time, appear to pass across extended deep-sky objects like star clusters. This month's challenge is to track a couple of these interesting events coming up over the next few months. The first is to locate asteroid 28 Bellona. At the end of February, this 100km object will appear relatively near the Beehive Cluster, M44, in Cancer, the Crab. If you can locate it during February, shining at mag. +10.1 against the background stars of southern Cancer, you should be able to get into the habit of keeping track of it as continues towards M44 during March. It eventually appears to cross the cluster…

While deep-sky images can often be easily identified as fakes, nightscape astrophotography is far more vulnerable. How many times have you seen an image of the Moon rising above a mountain or reflected in a calm sea, and doubted it was real? AI can be used to produce components of an image that can then be edited to produce a realistic composite. Depictions of transient events such as meteors or aurorae can be produced by AI quite convincingly, and combining these fakes with a real background star field or nightscape isn't hard to do. This means it now requires an expert eye to uncover fakes, though even then it can be tricky, posing a real issue for publishers, competition organisers and the science of astronomy as a whole. “There were…

Spectroscopy is surprisingly accessible to amateur astronomers. You can get started in the hobby by making your own spectrograph out of a CD and a cardboard tube (find the full details here: bit.ly/CDSpec). All you need to do is point the device at a bright light source, such as the Sun or a lightbulb, and the CD will act like a diffraction grating, splitting the light into a single rainbow line – the spectrum. You can either photograph this with a smartphone or look for yourself to see dark absorption and brighter emission lines striping through the rainbow colours. If you wish to take a look at dimmer light sources, you'll need to purchase a special prism or diffraction grating, which look much like a traditional astronomy filter. When used…

Venus is prominent in the evening sky after sunset, a veritable beacon due to its mag. –4.5 brilliance. It's so bright that tales describe how the planet has been mistaken by pilots for an oncoming plane. With it so well placed in the early evening sky this month, we have a great opportunity to use the planet for some less-than-conventional imaging and interesting experiments. Venus's impressive brightness comes from the fact that it's covered in reflective cloud. Albedo is the fraction of light reflected by a body, which for Earth is 0.43. For Venus it's 0.69 or nearly 70 per cent. Combined with its closer proximity to the Sun, it's no wonder it looks so brilliant in our evening or morning sky. Without any magnification, Venus is effectively a point…

FREE BONUS CONTENT Find our extended Gallery at www.skyatnightmagazine.com/bonus-content PHOTO OF THE MONTH The Elephant's Trunk Nebula Simon Todd, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, September 2023–October 2024 Simon says: “This two-panel image is part of a larger eight-panel mosaic. Capturing it was challenging due to the unpredictable British weather, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.” Equipment: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera, SharpStar 20032PNT reflector, Sky-Watcher EQ8 Pro mount Exposure: Ha 146x 300”, OIII 201x 300”, SII 151x 300”, 41h 50' total Software: Astro Pixel Processor, PixInsight Simon's top tips: “It's about patience. Light has travelled for millions of years to reach your telescope, so there's no need to rush! Keep at it and the results will come. And use calibration frames – they're essential for turning your data into stunning…

After a long, arduous climb, NASA's Perseverance rover has finally reached the top of Jezero Crater's rim. It took the rover three and a half months to vertically ascend 500 metres (1,640ft), at times creeping up slopes with a 20 per cent gradient, emerging in a region known as Lookout Hill. “Our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we've encountered since landing,” says Steven Lee, Perseverance's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges – even tried driving backward to see if it would help – and the rover has come through it all like a champ.” Perseverance is now set to begin its fifth science campaign, dubbed 'Northern Rim'. Over the next year, it…

All the molecules of life on Earth are orientated the same way, but the reason why that's the case is one of the biggest enigmas facing evolutionary biologists investigating the origins of life. Now a new NASA study has only served to deepen the mystery by revealing there's no reason why one orientation would be favoured over another. Earth life is based around proteins. These biomolecules are built from 20 amino acids which combine in different orders to create everything from enzymes to muscle and bone cells. Some of these amino acids can exist in two forms, each a mirror of the other, which are referred to as being right- or left-handed. Scientists call this handedness a molecule's 'chirality'. For some reason, life on Earth exclusively uses left-handed amino acids.…

Astronomers have zoomed in on a star going through its final days. Located 160,000 lightyears away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it's the first time a star beyond the Milky Way has been examined in such detail. WOH G64 is a truly enormous star, 2,000 times larger than our Sun, making it a red supergiant. Over the last decade, the star has grown dimmer and so a team of astronomers examined it using the Very Large Telescope in Chile to understand why. “For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way,” says Keiichi Ohnaka, from Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile, who led the study. “We discovered an egg-shaped cocoon closely surrounding the star. We're excited…

Back in 2008, when I was working as a professional astronomer, I was granted two nights on a big telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. I remember arriving at the summit of the volcano at dusk, very excited about this incredible opportunity. I went into the brightly lit telescope control room, plugged in my laptop and started preparing for the night of taking data. When it was dawn, I emerged into the sunrise, bleary eyed and ready for dinner… or was it breakfast? It was only years later that I realised I'd been to the summit of Mauna Kea and I hadn't looked up at the night sky with my eyes even once. I now see this lamentable situation was representative of a deeper state of mental difficulty that had crept…

There have been some memorable fight scenes in space over the years, but how many of them are an accurate representation of how the struggle would play out in microgravity? Let's look first at one-on-one combat. We don't see many fights between individuals wearing bulky spacesuits, which makes sense, given they would hinder movement. It probably wouldn't make for a very engaging action scene. So, we'll assume we're talking about a fight inside, where the air is oxygenated. Momentum would be the third opponent in any fist fight. Newton's laws dictate that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Down on Earth, punching someone would exert a force on them but also on you, though we can brace ourselves against the ground. In microgravity, however, the punch…

Whether you're in a doomsday film or flying a spaceship in deep space, you'll likely encounter the dangers of a densely packed asteroid field at some point in your sci-fi story. Huge rocks tumbling towards you, leaving little room to manoeuvre, make them an extremely dangerous place to be. As C-3PO remarks in The Empire Strikes Back, “the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1”. In reality, the distance between individual asteroids is huge. The main asteroid belt found in our Solar System lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and the average distance between individual asteroids is just under 1 million kilometres (621,370 miles). That's 24 times the circumference of Earth, so if Han Solo can't navigate it, maybe he shouldn't be flying.…

Gravity is a weird force. It not only acts on mass – every single particle that has mass exerts a tiny amount of gravitational attraction on every other particle – but also on space and time. In fact, according to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is nothing else than the slight curvature and deformation of four-dimensional spacetime, as a result of the presence of mass or energy. One consequence of the theory (which has been confirmed over and over again) is that gravity influences the flow of time. In a strong gravitational field, time slows down, at least for an outside observer. At the edge of a black hole – its event horizon – time even comes to a complete standstill. So if you want to live longer,…

DON'T MISS Titan and its shadow BEST TIME TO SEE: 8 February 12:48–19:20 UT, 24 February 12:28–18:50 UT Titan is Saturn's largest moon. Its large orbit, combined with Saturn's axial tilt of 26.73°, means that from Earth its orbit typically traces out a tangible ellipse. As a result, when Titan passes Saturn it either appears to move north or south of the planet's globe. However, things are unusual at the moment and from the perspective of Earth and the Sun, Saturn appears almost sideways-on. From the Sun's perspective, Saturn will appear edge-on on 6 May of this year, the planet then being at an equinox. From Earth, Saturn appears sideways-on a little earlier, on 23 March, the date when we experience what's known as a ring plane crossing. The bad…

Delta (δ) Aurigae is the main star at the top of Auriga, the constellation that looks like a misshapen pentagon. Delta on top of the pentagon forms a triangle along with Capella (Alpha (α) Aurigae) and Menkalinan (Beta (β) Aurigae) as the triangle's base. It shines at mag. +3.7 and so is an easy naked-eye star, but despite its labelled position as Delta, it's outshone by Epsilon (ε), Eta (η), Theta (θ) and Iota (ι) Aurigae. Delta's spectral class is K0 IIIb, K0 indicating an orange star and the IIIb indicating that it's a less luminous evolved giant star. It's slightly younger than our Sun at 3.26 billion years and is believed to be a red clump star, one that fuses helium in its core. It's also known to be…

In the universe of professional astronomy, there's a tidal surge of data. The Vera C Rubin Observatory is expected to become operational early in 2025 and it's anticipated that this alone will produce around 60 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) of data over its 10-year survey period. JWST produces over 50 gigabytes of data every day. Such huge amounts of information are overwhelming for humans to deal with. Here AI excels, able to recognise things such as faint light-curve dips, which reveal the presence of exoplanets orbiting their host stars, or detecting and classifying distant galaxies from the early stages of the Universe. However, there's danger here too. Using trained AI to look for known patterns means it's not looking for unknown stuff. And it's within the unknown…

When imaging deep-sky objects, we take multiple long exposures, either using a DSLR or cooled astrophotography camera, with the aim of capturing many hours of sub-exposures to stack together. The process of capturing this data, which can involve changing filters and star focusing, is called an imaging sequence and it can take days, weeks or even months to capture your chosen target. However, if you use items such as electronic filter wheels and autofocusers, this sequence can be automated using software that tells your equipment when to perform crucial actions such as locating the target, changing the filter or even making meridian flips. It can also ensure you return to the exact same patch of sky and continue imaging your deep-sky object over multiple nights – very useful if weather…

STEP 1 To capture the shadow cast by Venus, you'll need a flat western horizon free from significant light sources. The Moon is out of the way after the middle of February, making that the perfect time to try. A room with a window facing west is ideal, but if this isn't viable, a large cardboard box or equivalent can be used. STEP 2 Attach sheets of white paper to the bottom of your box to create a screen. The shadow-casting target should be placed in the open side of the box. Wait until true darkness falls, then point the open end of the box at Venus. Using a camera, try to record the shadow of the target on the screen surface. STEP 3 Ideally, use a reasonably high ISO…

VITAL STATS • Price £2,149 • Main sensor Sony IMX571 • Resolution 6,248 x 4,176 • Exposure range 32ms–2,000s • Size 98mm x 90mm, antenna 94mm • Compatibility iOS, Android, Linux, ASCOM • Connectivity USB 2.0 • Weight 760g • Supplier 365 Astronomy • Tel 020 33 845 187 • www.365astronomy.com There's a growing trend in the astrophotography market for smart devices – Wi-Fi-connected equipment that simplifies the way we capture images of the night sky. ZWO's ASI2600MC Air is a wireless smart camera that aims to do just that by combining three elements in one compact unit: a main imaging camera, a guide camera and an astrophotography controller. At first glance, the ASI2600MC Air looks like a standard deep-sky camera. It is barrel-shaped, mid-size and surprisingly lightweight at just…

What is a triply eclipsing three-star system? While orbiting their parent star(s), planets can sometimes cross the line of sight between the star and Earth. When they do, they produce a 'transit' that we can detect. Eclipsing star systems are similar. Instead of a planet, a star moves in front of another star, blocking some of its light. Triply eclipsing three-star systems consist of three stars orbiting a common gravitational centre. Two stars closely orbit one another, and both orbit a more distant third star. Sometimes, from Earth we can detect three sets of eclipses from these systems. What did your study discover? We discovered a triply eclipsing three-star system called TIC 290061484, consisting of a pair of inner stars orbiting one another in about 1.8 days and a third…