AstroPioneer

Here are some of the astronomical and stargazing highlights for October to December 2025. This covers both large and small night sky events that is possible to calculate in advance!

Here are some of the astronomical and stargazing highlights for July to September 2025. This covers both large and small night sky events that is possible to calculate in advance!

Not every thing in the night sky even though it's up there and visible is easy to see this can be due to various different things but in this case it's due to dust and the Galaxy being in the way. If the dust wasn't obscuring the galaxy it would be one of the brightest objects in  the night sky.

Here are some of the astronomical and stargazing highlights for October to December 2024. This covers both large and small night sky events that is possible to calculate in advance!

Here are some of the astronomical and stargazing highlights for July to September 2024. This covers both large and small night sky events that is possible to calculate in advance!

Its not a joke you can see the farside of the Moon, while the moon appears to always show one side of it to us, that isn't actually true. You can use your location of the Earth and some knowledge about the most favourable lunar libration times, to observe around the horizon of the moon. We calculate these times for you and put them in our quarterly astronomy almanac . The almanac covers the astronomical events that we are able to calculate in advance, due to the known orbits of the planets and moons in the solar system.  Occasionally multiple librations can occur on the same day, this is a great time to see a much larger section of the Moon's horizon. One of the important things to realize when using the almanac is the where the compass directions are in relation to the surface of the moon. Because this may not be what you would expect and may cause you to look at the wrong section of the moon after reading about when the next libration will occur! Use the image to the right to...

Here are some of the astronomical and stargazing highlights for April to June 2024. This covers both large and small night sky events that is possible to calculate in advance!

I am planning to travel to Northern Iceland this year in late October, early November to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights). Little did I know that I would be capturing Aurora in London! I got the notification two hours before they were due to arrive, and unlike something like the IIS you can't really plan for it, but luckily I have a go bag for astronomical emergencies. I quickly decided I wanted to capture the whole thing on camera determined to create a complete video of the event. The Aurora itself was powerful with reds being seen as high as the celestial pole and a full array of colors from the common reds and less common greens to even a hint of blue, being able to see all of the colors so far down must have meant there was a powerful solar storm going on in space. The event lasted about two hours in total on the night of the 10th of May 2024, and really got started when white streaks suddenly seemed to shoot along the sky from the horizon towards the celestial pol...

On a pleasant late April evening I went to see Chris Lintott at the Queen's House Greenwich as part of the Flamsteed Astronomical Society. There Chris was doing a talk focused around his new book Our Accidental Universe. So I thought I would leave a quick review of both the talk and the book.

There seems to be some exciting news about the upcoming Andromedids Meteor Outburst due for December 5th between 9 to 12 p.m UTC.

A few nights ago, I witnessed a train of Starlink satellites moving across the sky. I was quick to grab my camera and record them, but unfortunately, the footage turned out shaky due to the lack of a tripod. This experience motivated me to capture them again, but this time with better equipment. I find that the starlink sattelite trains, while many do complain about them are the most spectacular satellites found in the night sky.

I was in the South Downs, a dark sky site, looking at the night sky and I thought it was a great opportunity to explain how easy it is to find Polaris.

Several nights ago, I tried to see the Perseid Meteor Shower in Charmouth, an idyllic south coast town, but the weather wasn't cooperating. I was also using my DSLR to try and capture some of the fainter meteors. I, however, noticed an unusual object when I was going through the photos later on that I wasn't sure how to identify, so in this article I'll share what I did to identify that object, and maybe this will help you identify objects in the night sky as well that you are unsure about.

Have you ever wanted to know how you can spot the International Space Station for yourself and capture pictures like the one? This article tells you how.

Sometimes rather than just experiencing meteor showers , we actually get a meteor that hits the ground. The Natural History Museum in London contains one of the best collections of meteorites in the world, so we have to start this tour of the meteorites of London there. Once entering the Natural History Museum you can head up to the mineral section of the museum where they have a good selection of meteorites. The best example of which is the large iron meteorite from the Campo del Cielo meteorite impact which hit four to five thousand years ago. The impact created 26 craters with the original meteor being 4 meters in diameter. As this is an iron meteorite the public are allowed to touch it. But the truly special meteorites can be found in the vault at the back of the mineral section. The first special meteorite is a very rare mars meteorite. There are less than 70 known Martian meteorites, it is believed that 11 million years ago a large impact hit Mars and threw material into space, ...

Have you ever wondered how astronomy has changed over the years? Well I certainly have! It wasn't until I was in a second hand bookshop that I had an opportunity to discover what has changed for myself.

There appears to be a good chance of the Andromedids meteor shower having a strong outburst in 2023. The comet that started the Andromedids meteor shower was 3D/Biela. This comet was first discovered in 1772 and is the first comet that allowed us to identify the link between comets and meteors.

This article will cover a tour of my local observatory the famous Royal Observatory Greenwich, however while the observatory has a lot to do with clocks, navigation, latitude and longitude this tour will be focusing on the astronomical aspects of the observatory as that is what this blog is about. This was a professional observatory unlike the community observatory COSMOS observatory on the Isles of Scilly.

A question that comes up quite a lot and that is how to get the most out of your telescope I have come up with 10 tips that can help you get more from your telescope.

Learn about the M5 globular cluster, one of the most beautiful things in the night sky. Globular clusters are ancient clusters which were formed before the galaxy itself existed, lying within the milky way's halo, which surrounds the galaxy.