By now, we've seen dozens of incredible and inspiring Artemis II mission images, all taken with a range of cameras, including something similar to the iPhone you have in your pocket. Some of the best, though, were captured with pro-level, mirrorless cameras like the Nikon Z9, a powerful, behemoth of a 45.7MP shooter equipped with a 400mm lens.

For the past few weeks, I've been shooting with that very same kit, though, in my case, Nikon loaned me a massive 180 mm to 600 mm lens (Nikon told me it's like the newer version of the 400mm lens the astronauts used) and added a 2x teleconverter for good measure. It's inarguably the most camera I've ever used.

The Nikon Z9 is a robust (and at $4,996.95 expensive) camera that NASA chose because it can work in some pretty extreme environments. In addition to its most recent work on the Artemis II mission, it's currently on the International Space Station and is scheduled to join the Artemis III mission, which should land astronauts on the surface of the moon in 2027. The camera should, with a special enclosure, join the astronauts for space and moon walks.

When we reviewed the Nikon Z9 in 2022, we called it Nikon's "most powerful camera" yet, and I have to say it can be both powerful and complex. There are auto shooting modes, including nearly 500 points of auto focus capabilities, but the more I shot with the camera, the more I took control of the aperture, shutter, speed, and ISO, all in an effort to take the best moon shots of my life.

I mostly succeeded while also failing, largely because of my own fault.

The weight of the moment

When the full kit arrived, I realized how much I'd underestimated the size and scale of this equipment. Without a lens, the Nikon Z9 weighs almost three pounds. Part of that is to accommodate one of the largest batteries I have ever encountered in a mirrorless camera (it lasts for days). Even the storage media is larger: the camera uses a pair (one is for instant backup) of pricey Compact Flash Express cards (slightly smaller than classic compact flash).

Even though the Nikkor 180 mm to 600 mm lens ($2,095.96) features an internal zoom mechanism, it's still a foot long. Add the TC-2.0x teleconverter ($280), and it sticks out almost two more inches. The overall weight had to be close to 10 pounds, and I was glad I had a sturdy unipod, which came in handy during my first few days of trying to shoot the moon and various birds.

Let me start with a warning: if you don't have a pro-level, industry-grade tripod, keep walking. The Nikon Nikkor lens arrives with a collar that lets you attach the camera to your tripod with the weight properly balanced between the lens and the camera. That was a huge help for my unipod, but my tripod, which had been more than effective for my Sony Alpha a6000 and 200MM lens, was totally overmatched by this kit. It was barely strong enough to hold the thing still for long exposures.

A lot of my star or astrophotography was ruined by imperceptible vibrations. The other issue, I do blame on Nikon: No matter how hard I tried, I could not connect the camera via Bluetooth or WiFi to the SnapBridge app on my iPhone 17 Pro Max. With it, I could've used a remote shutter. At least I figured out how to gently touch the display to trigger a photo. When I did that, the camera would pause for a second and then snap the shot.

While the camera does not default to this setting, I chose to take every photo in both the highest resolution RAW and JPEG compressed. The former meant I could take all the information the sensor captured for every photo and pour it into Adobe Lightroom, where I would apply maximum adjustments to perfect each image.

Getting hooked

Yes, the Nikon Z9 with that massive lens is expensive and a bit overwhelming, but all it takes is one great photo to hook you, and let me tell you, I got hooked.

My first few days were spent taking some backyard bird photography. I had installed the 2X teleconverter, which essentially doubles your zoom but also amplifies any lens issues and removes a couple of lower f-stops (bigger aperture for more light), meaning you either need to increase the ISO or slow down the shutter.

The first bird photos I took on a cloudy day were grainy, even with some work in Lightroom; I didn't love them. So I opted to remove the teleconverter. After all, the birds weren't that far away (closer than the moon, at least), and with 45MP of sensor to work with, I could crop in quite a bit.

I saw instant improvement, and really appreciate the clarity and speed of the lens. The level of detail I was capturing, say, of local cardinals was stunning.

The big moment

Standing outside with the Nikon Z9 resting on my unipod, I scanned the sky for distant objects. The day was clear, and I noticed a fast-moving jet thousands of feet overhead. Mostly, I could see it's chemtrails, but I pointed the long lens at it and, for this shot, let auto settings (and autofocus do its work).

In the preview on the touch-screen viewfinder, I could see the plane, but I also thought I noticed a faint crescent nearby. Quickly, I opened Lightroom on my MacBook Pro and used the Nikon-supplied card reader and a USB-3-to-USB-C adapter to import the NEF file. That's when I saw it.

Not only had I captured the airplane, but the thin crescent moon; to have them both in frame like that was an incredibly lucky shot. In Lightroom, I did some adjustments to correct the sky color and help bring the moon and jet plane into dual focus.

You can see the photo above.

The moon and stars

I need to make something clear. The Artemis II astronaut's moon photos with the Nikon Z9 and other cameras are even more amazing when you realize that they captured these detailed views with relatively modest lenses. The Nikon Z9 they had was equipped with a 400mm lens. Nothing to sneeze at, but you look at what I captured with the Nikkor 600mm lens and then with the doubling 2x converter (akin to 1,200mm) and realize that my view is still not even remotely as close and clear as NASA's Integrity spaceship astronauts were.

It's humbling, really.

Even so, I did my level best to capture sharp, clear images of the moon and stars. As I noted above, the astrophotography was something of a bust. To do it well, you need not only to change all your settings to manual (including focus), but also to use the Nikon Z9's nifty Starlight setting on the large display viewfinder. It's an ultra-low-light view that helps immensely when you want to view the stars in your frame during what can be a challenging situation: outside, at night, in the dark.

I also had to adjust my ISO far higher to capture more light (I tried everything from 400 to 1250) and slow down the shutter speed, anywhere from 1 second to 30. My problem was the tripod, which, when I tried pointing the camera almost vertically at the stars, could not hold still. Most of my star shots have some starlight squiggles (not the tech term). Ultimately, I captured a couple of semi-usable images of Jupiter and its moons. One is super tight, and you can just make out some moons very nearby.

Fly me to the moon

I had better luck with the moon. It's a lot closer than constellations and planets, and far brighter, which meant I could lower my ISO (for less grainy shots), close down my aperture a bit, and use faster shutter speeds (usually 125th of a second).

I did not have the benefit of a full moon during most of my shooting window, but the 3/4 moon I saw the other night was still impressive. As before, I put the shots in Lightroom and did some adjustments to reduce the exposure and increase the contrast. I didn't adjust sharpness, and therefore the level of detail I can show you here (yes, I did crop the image) is still impressive. Since I didn't travel with the Artemis II crew, my photos still only represent the side of the moon we all see. They used the Nikon Z9 to show us the dark side in ways we had never seen before (and to capture views of our home looming in the distance).

There's no frustration that I could not fully match Team Artemis II's photographic accomplishments. Instead, holding that camera in my hand, I imagined what it must have felt like to look through the viewfinder and see the weathered face of our Moon in such impressive, almost touchable detail.

For the briefest moment, I felt a kinship with those astronauts, and while I'm aware that the onboard iPhone 17 Pro Max also captured some inspiring images, I know there's no substitute for a pro camera and big lens when it comes to capturing unforgettable, lucky, and sometimes historic astro and nature images.

• NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman has filmed an 'Earthset' on an iPhone 17 Pro Max
• The footage shows the Earth 'setting' behind the moon
• It's the first time we've seen video of this and it taken using the 8x zoom lens

It’s not every day that you see footage of the Earth setting behind the moon. But today NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman released the first video taken of that event in human history — and it was shot on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.

Posting on X, Wiseman shared a 53-second video shot through Integrity’s docking hatch window during the Artemis II mission, showing the Earth slowly disappear behind the moon.

It’s a stunning clip, and all the more impressive for having been shot on an iPhone — in fact, it would make a great advert for Apple’s phones.

A once in a lifetime scene

Wiseman claims the footage is uncropped and uncut, with “8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye.” We’re slightly confused by that claim as 8x zoom on this phone should be around a 200mm equivalent focal length, whereas the human eye is usually considered to be between 40-50mm.

Still, this is no time to get bogged down in technicalities — Wiseman described the scene as something that’s “only one chance in this lifetime” and “like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos.” The astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy, meanwhile, said it was "quite possibly the most incredible video ever captured by a phone. Bravo."

While this is among the more impressive scenes to come from the Artemis II mission, we’ve seen plenty of other shots and videos too — including some shot on iPhone.

Sadly, with the Artemis II mission now concluded there might not be too many more iPhone photos and videos to see from it, but it makes us all the more excited for what’s to come on future NASA launches.

The Cone Nebula is an immense pillar of gas and dust some seven light-years tall. It’s located in the constellation Monoceros 2,700 light-years from Earth, and is bathed in ultraviolet radiation from nearby stars, which it re-emits as brilliant red light. And right now, it’s in my living room.

Or rather, it’s on my phone, in my hand, as I sit in my living room staring in wonder at the majesty of our galaxy. Anyone could look at photos of the Cone Nebula at any time, of course, but this isn’t just a photo of the Cone Nebula — it’s a live feed* of it taken by the smart telescope quietly doing its thing in my back yard. That smart telescope is the ZWO Seestar S30 Pro, and it’s truly, breathtakingly awesome.

* Well, not really live of course — because the light it’s capturing left the nebula 2,700 years ago. But as close as we can get

Smarter than your average telescope

Smart telescopes have been around for a few years and have been a total game-changer for amateur astrophotographers such as myself. That's partly because they cost a fraction of what you'd need to shell out for a dedicated astrophotography rig with separate tracking mount, telescope, camera, and filters, but also because they're so simple to use.

And this last point is key, because taking photos of extremely dim objects trillions of miles away has, until recently, been a very hard thing to do (understandably so).

I speak from experience here, because I began my astro journey more than a decade ago by hooking up a mirrorless camera to a telescope on a tracking mount. It worked, and I captured some great images, but it was a real time-, money- and effort-sink, with arcane software to navigate, heavy gear to lug around, and a seemingly never-ending shopping list of new kit to shell out for.

The Seestar S30 Pro is about as far away from that as you could imagine; it's small, light, super-simple to set up, and just does its thing efficiently, leaving you free to enjoy the results. It's a revolution — like we jumped from developing film in a darkroom to snapping a photo on your iPhone in just a couple of years.

This is the fourth smart telescope I've used, following ZWO's original Seestar S50, the superb Dwarflab Dwarf 3, and the Dwarf Mini; I'm in the process of testing the latter right now and will be writing about that very soon.

All have their strong points, but if I could only own one, it would be the S30 Pro. And no, the views don't quite rival being on the Artemis II mission and gazing at the dark side of the Moon, but they're good enough for me.

Pro by name, Pro by nature

At launch, the Seestar S30 Pro costs $599 / £649 / AU$999 — a not inconsiderable amount, admittedly, but still far less than what you'd need to spend on an individual mount, 'scope, camera, and filters. Note, though, that stock is currently limited, with many stores reporting a wait time of a month or more.

For that price, you get a lot — essentially everything you need to take photos of galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, the moon, the sun, and even daytime targets such as birds.

The only thing you won't easily be able to capture with it is a planet, as most are far too small (relatively speaking) to show up as more than a dot. That's true of most smart telescopes, though, particularly at this price.

The S30 Pro has a dual-camera setup, with one telephoto and one wide lens. The 160mm telephoto is a high-quality 4-element apochromatic with a high-resolution 4K Sony IMX585 sensor, while the 6mm wide camera is also 4K and has an impressive 63-degree field of view.

Most of your shooting will be done with the tele, which is itself a pretty wide-angle affair; it captures a much larger section of the sky than the S50 or Dwarf Mini and a fair bit more than the Dwarf 3.

This is great, as it makes it much easier — and faster — to shoot large targets such as the Andromeda galaxy or Heart Nebula without needing to mess around with mosaics (which involves shooting different bits of the image separately, then stitching them together).

The downside is that smaller targets will be, well, smaller in the frame. But you can get around this to an extent by cropping — which in turn is made easier by the fact that the images are 4K. Do note, though, that the Seestar's sensor is vertical rather than horizontal — so it's better for 'tall' targets than wide ones. You can rotate it, but doing so will increase the time taken to get the full image.

The wide-angle camera, meanwhile, serves a dual purpose: it helps the S30 Pro's tele lens find its target, and can be used for widefield shots of the Milky Way.

The S30 Pro comes with several built-in filters, including a dual-band filter that brings out color and detail in nebulae, plus an external solar filter that clips on magnetically. You also get a rather nice carrying case, plus a mini tripod and USB-C cable for charging it up.

Speaking of charging, the S30 Pro has a 6,000mAh battery, which ZWO says is good for about 6hrs of shooting. If anything, I'd say that's a little conservative, and it definitely seems to drain battery more slowly than the bigger S50. Not that it matters too much either way, because you can simply plug in a portable power pack to give it enough juice to last through the night.

The 128GB of storage is twice the amount you get with the S50 or Mini, and the same as that in the Dwarf 3. This provides enough space to shoot multiple targets for multiple nights — each exposure, or 'sub', takes up 16.6MB, meaning you could fit many thousands on there before needing to delete some.

Size-wise, it's much more manageable than the rather hefty S50, which is itself a tiny little thing compared to a dedicated astro mount and telescope. The S30 Pro weighs just over 1.5kg — half a kilo less than the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on — and could easily fit in a backpack for a trip out to a dark-sky spot.

It's also really, really nicely built: solid, quiet in use, and with an attractive matt white finish. It's obvious from the moment that you unpack it that this is a quality product through and through.

None of that would matter if the image quality was lacking, though, so how does the S30 Pro fare in that regard? Well, I'm happy to report that it's not just good — it's incredible.

Bringing the heavens to life

Smart telescopes work by rotating in time with the skies, so your target stays centered, then taking lots of relatively short photos and 'stacking' them to bring out the detail.

This stacking is something that is needed for all astrophotography, because most subjects are so far away that sensors only capture a very small amount of their light, but a lot of unwanted noise. Stacking increases the signal-to-noise ratio to turn a dim, fuzzy blob into a glorious image of, say, the majestic Rosette Nebula.

You can see it in action below; this is a sped-up version, because in total I shot the Rosette for 2hrs using 1-minute exposures, so captured 120 frames in total — whereas this GIF is created from only 13 images. But you get the idea.

One of the key advantages of smart telescopes is that this stacking is done automatically as the telescope captures the data; you can see the target emerging from the noise and getting brighter and more detailed on your screen, the longer you snap away. There's an app for Android or iOS, and it works particularly well on iPad, where the larger display makes it easier to see what's happening.

Of course, you can also download the images — either the finished stack, or individual exposures — after you've finished, then process them separately in the likes of Photoshop or Lightroom, or using specialist astrophotography software such as Pixinsight or Siril.

The results when you do that can be incredible. Take the Rosette Nebula again: on the left of the image below, you can see the finished stack as it came out of the Seestar S30 Pro, complete with a trail from either a satellite or plane; on the right, there's the clean version created from individual frames I stacked in Siril and then processed in Pixinsight.

Don't have a laptop or desktop computer? No problem — because you can process images within the Seestar app instead. The results won't be quite as good as if you've done it yourself in specialist software, but as an example, here's the Rosette Nebula again, processed by the Seestar's Deep Sky Stack feature and compared to my Pixinsight version.

The wonders of the universe

I wasn't able to use the Seestar S30 Pro for the first month I had it, because the UK was being subjected to some kind of atmospheric torture game involving endless banks of clouds and rain.

A confession: this may actually have been my fault, because all astronomers know that a new telescope always comes with a free gift of cloudy skies, and I'd just taken possession of two, with the Dwarf Mini having been delivered soon after the Seestar. Sorry, everyone!

Eventually, the weather improved, and I got shooting — and quickly learned what this smart 'scope can do.

My first target was the obvious one for late spring: M42, the Orion Nebula. This is one of the brightest nebulae and can even be seen with the naked eye; look up at the night sky and you might glimpse it, just below the three stars that comprise Orion's Belt.

It only took a few minutes for it to start forming on my phone's screen, and an hour was long enough to bring out the wonderful red and violet hues of the nebula's central core. The image below is actually a composite of three nights' worth of shots, totalling 2hrs 40 mins, and with that level of integration, you can also easily make out the little 'Running Man' nebula above it.

Other targets at this time included the aforementioned Cone and Rosette nebulae, and one of my favorites — the Horsehead Nebula. The S30 Pro did a fantastic job with each of these, with the IMX585 sensor and quality glass combining to really bring out the bold colors, particularly once I'd processed them fully.

By mid-to-late March, we were in the midst of galaxy season, with the Milky Way and its colorful nebulae mostly out of sight and the targets consisting instead of the spiral arms and glowing centers of the likes of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.

These are not really the S30 Pro's forte; as I said above, they're generally too small to be well suited to the telescope's FOV. But they can still make for striking images, with the combination of a small galaxy against a vast backdrop of stars really bringing the enormity of the universe into sharp relief; I'm particularly pleased with how my shot of the lovely Needle Galaxy came out, for instance.

I also took photos of multiple star clusters, which the S30 Pro handled smoothly. The 'scope's high-quality glass really helps to pull out the individual stars — there are several hundred thousand in the M13 Great Hercules Cluster, and though my photo above can't resolve them all, it does a great job of capturing the dense cores.

And of course I took some photos of the moon and sun. My lunar shot is not quite up there with the image taken by the Artemis II astronauts, but it's mine, and I still love it. As with galaxies, the S30 Pro isn't ideally suited to the moon — the S50 provides a much closer view — but it sure beats a smartphone.

The sun, meanwhile, can be photographed via the included external solar filter. This snaps on magnetically, and after that, you simply select it in the app, wait for the 'scope to move to its target, then snap away.

Finally, to really put the Seestar S30 Pro through its paces, I turned it towards the Virgo Cluster. This is a galaxy-rich area of the heavens containing some 1,300-2,000 of the structures. Many are too small (or rather, too far away) to be captured by the Seestar S30 Pro, but I was astounded at just how many it did pick up.

For the shot below, I used the S30 Pro's mosaic mode, which increases the size of the shot by up to 2x. This isn't generally something you'll need to use, because the S30 Pro has such a wide field of view that most targets don't require it, but it can add some further drama to your imaging.

I've also included an annotated version that demonstrates just how many targets the S30 Pro was able to pick up here — more than 100 of them, though most are no more than dim, fuzzy blobs.

There are, of course, many thousands of subjects you could photograph in the night sky, with the best targets changing with the seasons.

Pretty soon, for instance, the Milky Way will be back in view for me — which will bring into play the beautiful Eagle Nebula and the colorful Veil Nebula, and the massive Heart and Soul Nebula. And whatever I end up shooting, it'll be the S30 Pro that I turn to first.

Everyone is buzzing about Apple's rumored iPhone Fold: it might arrive in September with the iPhone 18! It might not arrive then because of production delays! It might not have a crease! So what. Who cares? Did you see the iPhone on the Orion spaceship? The one that Artemis II mission crew members used to photograph the moon? That's what matters. That's what I want to talk about.

The iPhone Fold is important not because anyone needs it. It's about competition and slot-filling. Samsung has ably carved out a folding phone market (at 2.5% ov the overall market, it's still tiny) and everyone is looking at Apple, wondering what's up.

In typical fashion, the Cupertino tech giant has taken its dear sweet time to develop its own foldable, all while watching everyone else work out the myriad flexy phone kinks. You know the ones I'm talking about: water tightness, ability to withstand a grit of sand, screen durability, and that cursed screen crease.

Whatever Apple finally delivers in June or September or next year, it will probably be the best single-dolidding phone we've ever seen, and it still won't be as remarkable as what just happened in space.

Think about this: An iPhone 17 Pro Max traveled, along with the Artemis II crew, further away from where it was designed and built than any consumer technology has traveled before. Commander Reid Wiseman slipped it into his space suit (actually, the Artemis II ground crew slipped it in), and then probably patted the spot once before the Artemis II spacecraft rocketed up and off Earth to a rendezvous with the moon.

I knew astronauts were allowed to take smartphones with them, but it never occurred to me that they might be using them in space. After all, the Orion spaceship is already equipped with cameras on the solar arrays and a bunch of handheld DSLRs like the Nikon D5, along with some formidable 400mm lenses.

On the other hand, these four astronauts are products of a modern digital age. Of course, they took out their phones and snapped selfies with our home in the background. Naturally, Commander Wiseman used his iPhone 17 Pro Max's 8x optical zoom, which uses a sensor crop, to pull the moon's jagged surface close enough to almost touch.

It's clear that smartphone use, whether it's iPhones, Samsung Galaxy handsets, or Google Pixels, in space will now be a part of space travel. Every subsequent flight in our return to the moon and eventual colonization will feature imagery captured on mobile devices.

I won't argue that the images captured by Apple's 48MP main camera are better or of a higher quality than those captured with the Nikon D5 and its huge lens, but they tell a different, more personal story. When the camera can be held up with one hand to capture the astronaut and her environment, the entire mission becomes more relatable and human.

Remember this moment: the week the iPhone went to space, it matters, a whole lot more than whether or not you get to see an iPhone Fold in 2026.

• Artemis II astronauts have snapped the Moon with their iPhones
• The photos were shown off during a NASA livestream
• More images continue to be shared as the Orion spacecraft heads home

Having circled around the Moon, the crew of the Artemis II are now heading back home – and spectacular photos taken by the astronauts on board the Orion spacecraft, with their iPhone 17 Pro Max handsets, keep on coming.

This time, it's a picture of the lunar surface snapped by mission commander Reid Wiseman that we're marveling over. The image was shown off during a NASA livestream and posted to social media (via 9to5Google).

While the post below mentions the iPhone 17 Pro, we know that the astronauts were in fact given iPhone 17 Pro Max models, and those are the phones that are mentioned in the metadata linked to the images that NASA has shared so far.

Other details that have emerged over the snap are that it was taken using the iPhone's 8x zoom mode, and that it shows the Chebyshev crater on the far side of the Moon. The Orion has made use of the Moon's gravity to turn around and head back to Earth.

GoPros and Nikons

Wiseman and his colleagues will now have some pretty stunning phone wallpapers to show off when they get back home — as yet we don't have the original shot of the lunar surface, just the screengrab taken from NASA's livestream.

The iPhones given to the astronauts on Orion were being put to use shortly after launch, and no doubt Apple will be pleased by the publicity. We know the crew also has a GoPro and a couple of Nikon cameras on board.

Reactions on Reddit have ranged from a simple "wild" to the observation that "that would be my phone wallpaper for the rest of my life" — plus a note that "Apple are sorted for adverts for the next decade after this".

Having set a new record for going the furthest distance away from our planet than anyone has ever traveled before, the astronauts are expected to get back this coming Friday, April 10, via a splash down off the coast of San Diego.

The Artemis II mission crew is making history almost by the minute, and as it prepares for its flight path around the moon, the Orion spaceship has been sharing some photos, including a side of the moon humans have never viewed directly before.

The image, currently posted on social media but likely to be added to the NASA multimedia library soon, is of a moon we both know and, well, one we don't.

This stunning image arrives just a day after Artemis II astronauts delivered the first-ever iPhone space photos — taken with the selfie camera, no less.

At first glance, you might say, "Yup, that's the moon I know." But even a casual viewer knows something's not quite right. As the NASA post explains, the right side of the image faces Earth, and the left side is something no human has seen with their own eyes before.

Previous Apollo missions were actually too close to the Moon to get this view (158 miles in 1970). The Artemis Crew will fly about 4,070 miles above the surface, giving them a full view of Earth's lone natural satellite.

I've spent years photographing the moon with various digital cameras, especially a pair of Sony Alphas. First, I used the NEX-5 with a 150MM lens. Then I upgraded to my Sony Alpha A6000 and a 200MM lens backed by a 24MP sensor.

Look closely and see the Moon anew

I wanted to understand just how different our view is from that captured by NASA and the Artemis crew on Monday, April 6.

As you can see in the side-by-side photo above, which I created in Photoshop 2026, the differences are stark.

On the left is Orion's photo, which I only adjusted for brightness. On the right is a photo I took with the Sony Alpha A6000 in 2020.

In my photo on the right, you can see the signature dark patches, which, from the ground, often resolve into "the man on the moon", a surprised face that says, "How did I get here?"

Toward the left side of my image is a bright spot, likely a meteor strike. If you use that as a point of reference and then look at the Artemis II mission image on the left, you can see that the bright spot is now in the upper right.

Now, if your eye goes to the left on the Artemis II mission image, you quickly realize you're seeing things you never saw before,

What strikes me is what looks like a massive crater in the lower left quadrant. That's a feature we've never seen before.

If you have images of the moon or have spent a lot of time viewing it through a telescope, I encourage you to compare your views with this image. It's stunning and unforgettable.

What's even crazier is that the Artemis II crew is just getting started. What a great time for astronomy, space, and photography fans.

• We're getting photos from the Artemis II mission
• Some of these were snapped with the iPhone 17 Pro Max
• The mission is getting close to the halfway point

We know the crew of the Artemis II mission have taken iPhones up into space with them, and now we're getting some stunning snaps back from the astronauts as they make their way towards the moon.

As shared by NASA, we have spectacular shots of Christina Koch and Reid Wiseman looking back towards their home planet, as the Orion spacecraft pulls away from it — at speeds of thousands of miles per hour.

A quick check on the photos in NASA's archive (here and here) shows that both these images were taken using the selfie camera on an iPhone 17 Pro Max. That's the same model that got a 4.5/5 star rating in its TechRadar review.

The astronauts themselves are sharing pictures on social media: here's another shot from Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old designated as the overall commander of the mission. The caption simply reads "There are no words."

NASA has also more recently shared some stunning photos taken on the Artemis II mission's Moon fly-by, which were this time shot on the Nikon D5 — a trusty, decade-old DSLR.

There and back again

There's likely to be plenty more to come too, as Orion reaches the moon, circles around it, and heads back home. We know the spacecraft is fitted with laser communications tech that can maintain a high-speed connection with Earth.

NASA has also shared an image of the moon taken by the Artemis II crew, with the Orientale basin visible on the lunar surface. This is apparently the first time the basin has been seen in its entirety with human eyes.

Once the team of astronauts has gone around the moon and started coming back, they will have gone further away from Earth than any other human beings before them — some 252,757 miles or 406,773 kilometers.

The mission is now in its fourth day, with the entire trip expected to take 10 days. When the Orion spacecraft comes back into Earth orbit, it'll mark another first: the fastest crewed reentry ever attempted, at around 25,000 miles per hour (40,234 kilometers per hour).

High atop a 2,514-foot plateau in Chile’s dramatic and arid Atacama Desert sits a window into our universe – the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Just 40% complete and with a price tag of over $2.5 billion, the massive telescope with its 25.5-meter mirror may be our best chance to find a planet like ours, called an exoplanet – and, perhaps, even life like ours.

But that dream could be almost a decade away, and in the meantime a consortium of countries, universities, scientists, and engineers must complete the project and learn how to work it safely and maintain it.

For that, they’ve turned to gaming – or, more precisely, to one of the preeminent 3D game-creation platforms: Unreal Engine.

“Video game engines pretty much lend themselves to simulating physical environments, and they've gotten so sophisticated, now, especially Unreal Engine, and user-friendly,” said Christopher Madden, Giant Magellan Telescope Senior Mechanical Engineer.
“So, we saw a huge opportunity in using Unreal Engine to try to help simulate and give us a tool to kind of practice, create a training tool before we get out there, to reduce risk for the project.

Madden and his team have essentially built a centimeter-for-centimeter simulation of the Giant Magellan Telescope, from the giant, segmented mirror to the massive rolling base that turns slowly and precisely to allow the aircraft-carrier-sized bay doors to keep pace with the telescope as it tracks objects billions of miles away.

Aptly named Builder of Observatory Behavior, or BOB for short, the system has been developed in partnership with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, a platform that also powers popular games like Fortnite, PUBG, Final Fantasy, and Batman: Arkham Knight.

Why build a fully functioning replica that you can walk through and even operate machinery within? One reason is its unprecedented nature.

"There's no telescope this large ever built," said Ryan Kallabis, Magellan’s Director of Communications, "it's not like we have a precedent for how to do these things."

“This is a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar project. And we use seven of the world's largest mirrors, and they cost anywhere around $30 million apiece, and they take four years to make. So, losing or breaking one would be a big problem for the project. Having tools like this, BOB, to simulate how you would move, polish, maintenance them before it actually gets live is a huge value.”

This BOB makes so much sense

I virtually stood inside BOB, controlling the default Unreal mannequin via a web-based streaming interface to walk her through the corridors and up into the complex machinery of the telescope and the building’s rotation system. It’s not a high-resolution rendering, but the detail is there, and it can, if necessary, output HD images.

Even in this digital form, it’s clear that this is a monumental structure. Kallabis told me, “The enclosure, which houses all the mirrors, optical technologies, instruments, and software, and controls […] is 65m tall, and […] roughly 60m in diameter as well. It is the largest enclosure for a telescope that's ever been built for […] this type of Gregorian telescope.”

The telescope mount is 30m tall and holds the seven giant mirrors, each of which is 8.4m in diameter, arranged like petals on a flower. Together, they make up the giant, 25.5m-wide light-collecting surface.

The way that this telescope, and most of its kind, work is by collecting light from the night sky, focusing and reflecting it back up into a much smaller set of mirrors, and then shooting that light back down into a barrel housing the image sensors.

At one point in our demo, Madden positioned the avatar atop one of the mirrors to give me a sense of scale. It looked like an ant on a giant, reflective flower.

It’s a complex system with untold challenges for use and upkeep. Even its Chilean location offers up particular hurdles.

“The temperature extremes are quite acute, and then also it has to track objects in the sky,” explained Kallabis. “So, these mirrors are moving, and they're multi-ton mirrors. I think they're about eight tons a piece, and they're tracking objects, billions of light-years away. And so, we need to keep them consistent in their shape, and that cell that it's on [high-tech platforms for each mirror] allows for the heat.”

One of the issues is that these mirrors need a fresh coating of their reflective surface almost every three months. That means they must partially disassemble the telescope and move the mirror to the building’s base to prepare it for recoating.

“The space we’re working with is limited,” Madden told me. “The limitations are real. So the planning has to be very good, and when it comes down to even the support requirement you're going to need in the area, not just the main equipment for the telescope itself, but you know, ladders, toolboxes, the number of personnel who really have to have a good idea of how much space we have when we have it.”

That’s the beauty of the Unreal-based BOB system. It allows the team to game out the entire scenario and train for it. Plus, it’s built in such a way that people who don’t have training in building or working with, say, a complex CAD system can use it.

“You just kind of [need] general video game knowledge to use it instead of having familiarity with the CAD platform,” said Madden.

Taking a telescopic test drive

The controls are game-like. To move about the BOB virtual Giant Magellan Telescope, I used a combination of laptop keyboard presses that would be familiar to anyone who’s done a little PC gaming. I pressed W to move forward, A to move left, D to go right, and S to move back. If you have a game controller, you can use that instead. There’s also a drone mode that lets you basically fly through the massive structure – I struggled a bit to control that one, though.

I approached an accurate recreation of a boom, hopped in, and used the controls to lift the basket up for a better view of the mirror array. I couldn't figure out how to lower it, so I jumped out. The similarity to game play was palpable.

Madden guided me to step virtually outside. I approached a red truck and was told to get inside; however, when I approached the right side of the pickup truck, nothing happened. Madden instructed me to go to the driver’s side. I suggested, though, that the simulation work, in this instance, a bit more like PUBG or Fortnite, where you can approach a vehicle from almost any side and hit a key to enter. BOB may see that in a future update.

Once inside the truck, I started to drive around the telescope building’s perimeter – for a few seconds ¬– before driving off a ledge and rolling the truck onto its roof. Madden agreed he needed to add a guardrail there.

My experience, in a way, proves the value of the BOB system, which, true to its gaming roots, also supports multiplayer… er multi-user interactions.

“You could have a bunch of people in different parts of the world working on the same problem,” said Kallabis.

With billions of dollars and countless hours of expertise pouring into this almost one-of-a-kind observatory, team and individual training will be critical.

“If somebody was going to use this as a training tool, the person training would have knowledge of what's even available at site…what the actual conditions are. It'd be, I think, invaluable… as opposed to having somebody completely untrained to show up on-site,” said Madden.

At one point, Madden showed me the process of replacing one of the buildings’ giant, motorized wheel trucks. It’s a complex, multi-step operation that requires literally lifting portions of the building to move out the equipment. It was all represented in virtual form via a collection of canned videos that Madden recorded within the BOB system.

That process, which not only shows how to do it, but also how the challenges of moving these parts in the building’s sometimes small spaces, plays out across a series of seven videos that engineers can watch over and over again. In theory, that knowledge will then make the real-world process that much easier and safer.

Protecting a window into the cosmos

Building such a virtual recreation in a CAD system like AutoCAD might be possible, but Unreal brings specific and almost unmatched capabilities that seem perfectly built for this system.

“With Unreal, you're able to really visualize a mesh-based model, very complicated geometry. Also, Unreal has Nanite. With Nanite – it’s a miracle – you can just basically, throw some very messy models in there,” said Madden.

The pair explained that the value of preparation offered by BOB cannot be understated, noting how at other telescopes the process of, say, moving or recoating a mirror has resulted in one of them getting chipped or damaged.

“Every ounce of preparation we can do beforehand really helps prevent those things from happening,” said Madden.

It’s not just about maintenance and repair. There is one other big benefit to using this gaming engine. “Unreal Engine has a built-in new feature in 5.7 called Celestial Vault that has realistic skies. You put the location and the data in, and it actually gives you real star charts for those areas. So, I have integrated that into this, too,” explained Madden.

Basically, you can simulate the entire experience of using the Giant Magellan Telescope with the BOB system, and its capabilities help clear a path for the true purpose of this giant star gazer.

Situated approximately 160km from the nearest city and given the location's dry climate, the Giant Magellan Telescope may enjoy 300 clear nights per year. When it comes online sometime in the 2030s, this will give it the best possible chance to detect faint objects and fulfill its mission of finally finding those thousands of Earth-like exoplanets rotating relatively close to their home stars.

“This is one of the first telescopes in human history that'll be able to potentially detect Earth-like planets for the first time,” said Kallabis, “So Chris here is creating a simulation for maintenance and, safety behaviors so that we can keep this telescope operational and continue doing good science for the lifespan of the observatory, which is roughly 50 years.”

DwarfLab Dwarf III: Two-minute review

The Dwarflabs Dwarf III smart telescope is a mini marvel. My first astrophotography set-up 10 years ago weighed more than 20kg / 44lbs – but this excellent little self-contained device comes in at a mere 1.3kg / 2.8lbs and is small enough to fit in airline carry-on luggage.

In fact, that's exactly what I did with it a few months ago, taking it with me on vacation to Greece. I've also used it extensively in my garden in the UK and compared it thoroughly to another smart telescope, the ZWO Seestar S50. And as you can see from my verdict and score above, I love it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's start with the basics.

The Dwarf III is one of the new breed of smart telescopes which simplify and automate the process of astrophotography to bring it to within easy reach of those without the time or money needed for a 'proper' set-up of mount, telescope and camera.

As with smart telescopes from rivals ZWO, Vaonis and Unistellar, the Dwarf III doesn't have an eyepiece you look through, and doesn't in any way resemble a classic telescope such as a reflector or refractor. Instead, it tracks objects in the night sky then takes photos of them and 'stacks' them.

This process increases the faint signal being captured in order to bring out details – because if you just looked at a single shot, you'd see very little beyond a few stars. The resulting image can be viewed in real-time as it develops on your phone's screen, which is essentially your eyepiece.

You can see it in action below, with the fuzzy object that's barely visible after five frames eventually becoming the recognizable Crescent Nebula after about 60 frames:

The Dwarf III has two lenses to capture its targets, one 35mm telephoto and one 3.4mm wide-angle – although the latter is mainly used for finding objects rather than shooting them.

The telephoto has a 2.9x1.7-degree field of view, which can fit the moon in it about six times and which has space for almost every galaxy and nebula you might want to capture. I go into this in more detail below, but this wide FOV is one of my favorite things about it.

Inside, there's a 4K IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor, which is on the budget end compared to that found within dedicated cooled astronomy cameras but which delivers excellent results, helped also by the fast f/4.3 f-ratio; this captures light more quickly than some rival smart scopes.

It's all controlled by the DwarfLab app, which gives you everything you need to take photos of the night skies without the need for you to do much more than choose your target and set it going. Even if you've never used a smart telescope – or any kind of telescope – before, you should be up and running within a few minutes.

In fact, roughly 20 minutes after taking it out of the box you could be viewing your first shot of wonderfully named objects such as the Elephant's Trunk nebula or Sombrero galaxy – the Dwarf III really is that easy to set up and use.

And when you do so, I'm pretty sure you'll be impressed, because the Dwarf III takes excellent photos given its small stature and low-ish price. It's truly one of the best ways into this fascinating hobby.

DwarfLab Dwarf III: price and availability

The DwarfLabs Dwarf III was released in May 2025 and is competitively priced, coming in at $549 / £459 / AU$849. Depending on where you are in the world, that's either slightly cheaper or the same price as one of its main rivals, the ZWO Seestar S50, which costs $549 / £539 / AU$949. Compared to the Seestar S30, which is a comparable size to the Dwarf III, it's more expensive though; that model comes in at $399 / £419 / AU$699.

It's also worth noting that unlike the two Seestar models, the Dwarf III doesn't come with a tripod. Many keen photographers and stargazers will already own one, but if not you can buy one with the telescope for an additional $89 / £73 / AU$149. Or, of course, you can add your own; we have plenty of good options in our list of the best travel tripods. Either way, that might bump up the price a little.

DwarfLab Dwarf III: Specs

DwarfLab Dwarf III: Design

Looks-wise, the Dwarf III is about as far from a traditional telescope as you could get. Powered off, it resembles a beefy external hard drive from about 2010, but turn it on to reveal the twin lenses and it's more like some kind of futuristic security-camera-robot hybrid.

It's actually pretty cute, with a certain Wall-E charm about it (or maybe that's just me). Either way, it's well built: solid, with a smooth plastic finish and an IP54 rating that keeps it safe from dust, moisture and dew.

It's also impressively small – like, how-did-they-fit-all-that-in-there small, a feeling that only grows after you see what it's capable of. It's relatively light, too, at 1.3kg / 2.87lbs; that's almost half the 2.5kg of the Seestar S50 and a little less than the S30.

There's not a lot to look at, externally. Beyond those two lenses and the DwarfLab logo, there's the main power button – a big circular affair that's very easy to find in the dark and which has a glowing green ring around it – plus a battery status indicator of four green dots, and a single USB-C charging port. On the bottom, meanwhile, there's a 1/4-inch tripod thread.

It comes with an excellent carrying case, plus a couple of accessories: a USB-C charging cable, lens wipe cloth, plus a solar filter. The latter snaps on magnetically in a pleasing fashion, and comes with a pouch to keep it safe.

Design is all very well thought out and though it's a shame it doesn't come with a tripod, that's the only minus point in this regard. It's not a massive problem, either, because many of the telescope's intended customers will already have one, and it helps keep the price low.

I've been using either the Seestar S50's tripod or a K&F Concept 64in/163cm model which costs $49 in the US, £45 in the UK and AU$150 in Australia. This is light, sturdy and has a 360-degree ballhead which makes it very easy to angle the Dwarf III for EQ mode (of which more later).

DwarfLab Dwarf III: Features and performance

The Dwarf III is a feature-rich device, with a multitude of abilities and use cases.

Obviously the first of those is to take photos of the night skies, and it does that very well thanks to its 4K Sony IMX678 Starvis 2 sensor – the same type as used in some of the best dash cams, including the Thinkware U3000 Pro. Starvis 2 is particularly strong in low light, while the IMX678's 4K resolution gives you more pixels to work with when cropping in on small and distant objects.

The twin lenses are very helpful. The telephoto is what you'll take most of your images with, while the wide-angle one is mainly for locating objects in the first place; you can take photos with it too, but it has a much lower resolution.

I've got a full gallery of astro images taken with the telescope below, but for now here's just one, my favorite that I've shot with the device. It shows the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16, and if you zoom in on the middle you'll see the famous 'Pillars of Creation', the swirling clouds of dust and gas that wowed the world when the Hubble telescope shot them two decades ago.

The Dwarf III has three internal filters. The most important is the dual-band filter, which targets the OIII (sulphur) and H⍺ (hydrogen) wavelengths – in layman's terms, this means it can capture more of the faint details in nebulae and reduce the impact of light pollution. There's also an astro filter, which extends into the infra-red range and which works best on galaxies and star clusters, and a 'VIS' filter which is used for daytime photography. All are easily selected within the Dwarf III's app; you don't need to physically attach anything.

Speaking of daytime photography, DwarfLabs make a big pitch around the telescope's usefulness around bird watching, and theoretically you could use it instead of a mirrorless camera and telephoto lens for any subject – just don't expect it to rival an expensive chunk of glass from Canon, Nikon or Sony.

The daytime photography ('General') mode includes burst and timelapse options, plus object tracking which I found to be a little hit and miss. 4K video can be recorded at up to 30fps, or 60fps if you switch to 1080p.

There's also a solar system mode for snapping the sun, moon and (theoretically) planets, plus a panorama mode. In Astro mode, meanwhile, you can shoot in either alt-azimuth or equatorial mode.

Performance-wise, the Dwarf III is pretty snappy to turn on and off, and slews to targets quickly and reasonably quietly; it makes less noise than the Seestar S50, for instance, although neither would be likely to wake even the lightest of sleepers next door.

In use, it's unerringly accurate in finding targets, zipping about the sky when you tell it where to go via the built-in star atlas.

It's also incredibly reliable when shooting. If the tracking on a motorized telescope is even a tiny bit off, you'll get star trails and the individual frame will be rejected and not included in the 'stack', potentially reducing detail in the final stacked image. With the Dwarf III, this almost never happened – I generally got around an 80-90% success rate, so if I shot a target for an hour, I'd get around 50 minutes' worth of photos. This is way better than my experience than shooting with the Seestar S50, where it can be more like 50% at times.

Plus, that's when shooting with 15-second exposures in alt-az mode; put it in EQ mode and you can get 30s shots with a similar success rate. This all makes it very easy to capture a lot of data on a target in a short time.

One of the few downsides is that the battery is not the biggest – only 10,000mAh, which is good for about 5 hours in astro mode when tracking and shooting a target, according to DwarfLab, and which was about right in my experience. You almost certainly won't get through a full night's shooting with it.

That said, I didn't put it to the test often, preferring instead to leave a much bigger power bank connected to it to ensure I got a full night's shooting. I tend to use Iniu power banks, which I've found to be very reliable and extremely well priced; the model below is well worth checking out and will triple the Dwarf III's capacity.

DwarfLab Dwarf III: Software

The nature of a smart telescope means that all of your interactions with it will be via an app – it's not like you can look through as you can with an old-school reflector or refractor.

That puts a lot of pressure on the device's software to be slick and simple to use, and fortunately the Dwarf III's is just that – with a few caveats.

I began using the Dwarf III several months ago, and on my first few nights shooting with it found the interface to be a little confusing. It wasn't a horror show by any means, but it wasn't as intuitive as ZWO's Seestar app. For instance, I'd click on the big 'Photo' button front and center to start shooting a galaxy or nebula, then would realize that I'd have to go back in and select the 'Atlas' option to actually choose my target.

Settings for options such as exposure time, meanwhile, were hidden within a menu called 'Function' – which really didn't (to me) suggest 'Settings'. I got used to it all after a few nights, but it was a little more confusing than it could have been.

The good news is that DwarfLabs is continually updating the platform, and a recent update has massively improved the experience. Those settings are now within a menu named 'Parameter, which is far more sensible, and the Atlas is available from within the shooting screen. There's a simple toggle between the wide and telephoto cameras, whereas before you tapped the small one to change between them, but again without labelling. It's all much more slick and easy to use.

(Note that most of my images in this review are using the old version of the software, because there's not been a clear night in the UK for me to take further screenshots for what feels like about 15 years now. I'll update them soon.)

There's a scheduling feature within the app, which works as you'd want it to and which is better than the one in ZWO's app. This is a vital inclusion, because most people won't want to stay up all night – they'll want to set the Dwarf III running with a list of targets, then wake refreshed in the morning to a lovely collection of images.

Switching to EQ mode is also pretty trouble-free. For the uninitiated, this lets the Dwarf III rotate fully in sync with the skies, meaning you can take longer exposures than in standard alt-az mode. Anything longer than 30 seconds will need to be in EQ mode (the maximum exposure is two minutes) and in my experience it's best for 30 seconds too; alt-az mode is fine for 15s exposures.

The Dwarf III app guides you through the process of setting the telescope into EQ mode, telling you exactly which direction and what amount to adjust the tripod head by, and the whole thing only takes about five minutes, less if you haven't moved the tripod since the previous session.

The included Stellar Studio software is also great. This lets you carry out basic processing actions on photos via the cloud, rather than needing to download them to your computer.

It's not exactly stacked with options, but does a really good job of reducing noise, sharpening stars and bringing out details. You can also remove stars entirely if you want that lovely clean view of a galaxy or nebula.

Finally, in 'General' mode the app works pretty well to let you zoom in on a target. You can use the wide-angle view to get an overall view of your surroundings, then click on the screen to adjust where the telephoto lens is pointing. Another click switches to the telephoto view and you can start snapping away.

DwarfLab Dwarf III: Image quality

There's one very important thing that anyone using a smart telescope for the first time needs to understand: you won't be getting Hubble-challenging images straight out of the camera. Well, obviously, you won't be getting Hubble-challenging images at all; this is a $500 smart telescope, not a rig that costs 10 times that.

But even with that in mind, there's a big difference between the photos that the Dwarf III creates for you, and the results that you can achieve with some proper processing.

The easiest way to demonstrate that is with some before and after photos – so check out the gallery above. In every case, you'll see the unprocessed image produced by the Dwarf III first, followed by the version I processed in Pixinsight, the specialist astrophotography software I use.

Now, let's get one thing straight: I'm not an expert when it comes to astro image processing. It's an incredibly complex hobby, with sometimes arcane software to master and a surprisingly large amount of technical knowledge needed to really get the best results. In fact, I think I prefer some of the Dwarf III's images, at least when it comes to color – which is one of the toughest things to get right.

Regardless of what you think of my images (I won't be offended, promise), you can see that processing reduces noise and brings out more detail and color. To really get the best from the Dwarf III, you will still want to do some processing.

Fortunately, as mentioned above, it's pretty easy to considerably improve things within the Dwarf III's Stellar Studio on your phone, with no need to shell out for or learn anything more complicated.

For instance, try the above image of the glorious East Veil nebula – the original, unprocessed image is pretty good, but Stellar Studio turns it into something epic, and my Pixinsight version is only a slight improvement (if anything).

One of the things I really love about the Dwarf III is its wide 2.9x1.7-degree field of view, even when using the telephoto camera. The Seestar S50 has a much narrower 0.7x1.2-degree FOV, while the S30 is close to the Dwarf at 1.22x2.13-degree.

The net effect of this is that you get a real sense of drama with the Dwarf III. I love the Seestar S50, but with many targets you end up with a close-up of the object. You can get around this by using mosaic mode (the Dwarf also has one of these), but in my experience mosaics take longer to shoot and are harder to process.

The Dwarf, meanwhile, almost always captures the object and its surroundings. Its field of view is wide enough to cover the whole of Andromeda, for instance, whereas the S50 gets only the central section.

Of course you may prefer a closer view of targets, but the Dwarf's 4K resolution means you can crop in anyway and still have a decent-sized image. It's possible that the Seestar S30 will give me the FOV I love from the Dwarf with some of ZWO's advantages too, but I've not used that device yet, so that comparison will have to wait.

In general mode, image quality is fine. That's a pretty nice shot of a pigeon on my lawn above, but view the full-size image and you'll see the feathers lack definition. My Fujifilm X-T5 mirrorless camera would do a better job with a good zoom lens.

Solar photography, meanwhile, is easy to do – you simply snap on the filter then move to the target. Admittedly, for some reason the Dwarf finds it much harder to locate the sun than it does a tiny object many millions of light years away, but the Seestar S50 is no different in this regard.

I've only taken a few solar shots with the Dwarf III and was relatively impressed by them, but it's not an area of photography I'm particularly interested in.

Should I buy the DwarfLabs Dwarf III?

Buy it if…

Don't buy it if…

Also consider

How I tested the DwarfLabs Dwarf III

I took the Dwarf III with me on vacation to Crete, Greece, where I was lucky enough to be staying in an apartment with a roof terrace – and in a country with clear skies every night. I used the smart telescope extensively over the next week or so, taking photos of multiple targets including the Eagle nebula, Omega nebula and Andromeda galaxy.

When I returned to the UK, I used it whenever I could, which unfortunately was not that often due to the clouds which blanket the nation for about three-quarters of every month. Here, I set it up alongside my ZWO Seestar S50, taking photos of the same subjects for the same amount of time so I could directly compare results.

I also tried it in EQ mode, in Solar mode, in General mode for a bit of nature photography and spent many hours processing the photos it produced in all modes.

• Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released its first full-resolution image
• It was captured using an ultra-powerful 3,200-megapixel digital camera
• The telescope will scan the sky for dark matter, asteroids, and Planet Nine

The world’s most powerful digital camera has taken its first photos, and they reveal the cosmos in stunning detail. Shared as part of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s ‘First Look’ campaign, the composite image captures a panoramic view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae – a region where new stars are being formed.

The stills come from the largest digital camera ever made. With a resolution of 3,200MP, it’s the central component of the telescope at the Rubin Observatory in Chile. By capturing a scene some 4-5,000 light years from Earth, the images offer a spectacular glimpse of the star-making machinery of our universe.

The full-size image, which you can download here, is made up of 678 individual exposures, measuring around five gigapixels in total. A closer look reveals stellar clouds of dust and gas in breathtaking color and detail. More impressive than the scale, though, is how quickly the observatory produced the image: it took just 7.2 hours.

That makes the Rubin unique among space telescopes. By working fast and covering an ultra-wide field of view in each frame, it’s able to map large areas in a short amount of time. The results are as scientifically valuable as they are beautiful. By revealing regions of the universe in new depth, they allow researchers to advance their understanding of our cosmic surroundings.

All eyes to the sky

These early images mark the start of a new era in astronomy. The Rubin Observatory is about to begin the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a ten-year mission to map the night sky in unprecedented detail. It’s a project which could fundamentally change our understanding of the universe – not just because of what it reveals, but because of how often.

Unlike traditional observatories which target narrow slices of space, the Rubin telescope is designed to scan the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every three nights. The dome repositions quickly to cover the heavens, capturing images more than once a minute for around ten hours. This regular cadence will allow astronomers to detect changes more readily.

The observatory is situated atop Cerro Pachón, a mountain peak in northern Chile. The remote location, high altitude and dry climate create near perfect conditions for astronomy: the thinner air and lack of light pollution allow the telescope to take advantage of clearer, darker night skies. That gives the Rubin Observatory a wide observational window.

During its testing phase, it detected more than 2,000 previously unknown asteroids in just 10 hours, highlighting the telescope’s potential as an early-warning system for our planet.

The observatory is also expected to play a leading role in the hunt for the hypothetical Planet Nine, a massive celestial body which some scientists believe to be hiding on the distant edge of our solar system. Its powerful optics and sweeping reach make the Rubin telescope the perfect tool for spotting what's lurking beyond Pluto’s orbit.

But perhaps Rubin’s most ambitious goal relates to what can’t be seen. By capturing data from countless galaxies, the observatory will help researchers to build a better picture of the invisible dark matter that makes up most of the universe – and the mysterious dark energy that’s causing its expansion.

Key to the mission is the camera itself, which is the largest ever installed on a telescope. The size of a small car, it captures a portion of the sky equivalent to 45 full moons in a single shot.

Over the course of its survey, Rubin is expected to generate more than 60 petabytes of data. It will be up to the world’s scientific community to analyze the results and decipher their secrets.

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• I spent a year with the $550 smart telescope that's shaking up the astrophotography world
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Astrophotography is famously hard on the wallet and demanding of your free time. Sure, it's easy enough to snap a photo of the moon on your phone, but getting a good shot of a galaxy is an entirely different matter. But all that's changing, thanks to a new wave of smart telescopes that are ushering in a revolution in deep-sky photography.

The ZWO Seestar S50 is one of a cluster of these automated marvels that have arrived in the past few years. Like the others, it combines a tracking mount (to keep the target centred) with a computerized database and a camera in one compact package.

What's more, it only costs $550 / £500 – a fraction of what you'd spend on a 'proper' deep-sky setup and a fair bit less than rivals such as the Unistellar Odyssey Pro and Vaonis Vespera Pro.

All sounds too good to be true, right? Except it's not – and I know because I've been using one for the past year.

Deep skies are the limit

To explain why I've fallen in love with the Seestar S50, I need to explain why I'd fallen out of love with astrophotography in the previous few years.

I've always been fascinated by space. On my first day at school, I was asked to draw a picture showing what I wanted to be when I was older. "I'm going to be a spaceman!" I excitedly told my parents later, but sadly, a lack of coordination and a fear of heights put paid to that idea. Even so, my fascination with the skies never waned, so taking photos of deep space seemed like the next best thing.

A little research soon taught me that I needed more than just a camera – specifically, a mount. Yes, you can do astrophotography with one of the best mirrorless cameras, but without a mount to track the sky, you'll get star trails as the heavens revolve (or rather, as the Earth does). These look very pretty, but they're not what I wanted.

No, I wanted to take photos of galaxies such as Andromeda and fantastically named nebulae such as the Horsehead and Flaming Star. So, I bought an equatorial mount, a refractor telescope, and about a dozen different adapters and cables to connect my Fujifilm camera to them.

It took me several nights to understand the arcane software I needed to control it all – and to work out how to do polar alignment, which involves lining up the mount with a star so it tracks accurately. But once I'd mastered that, I was up and running.

Over the next couple of years, I took some wonderful images that I'm really proud of; the one of the Orion nebula above is my favorite. None of them rivalled those produced by the pros, but they scratched an itch.

The trouble is that astrophotography is really hard.

It's hard on the wallet because telescopes aren't cheap, and you also need to buy an (even more expensive) tracking mount, filters, a dedicated astro camera, and about a hundred different adapters and accessories.

It's hard to get great photos because most of these objects are really far away, and every photon counts. You mess things up even a little, and you could end up with a blurry mess for your night's work.

It's hard on the back because mounts and telescopes are seriously big and heavy. If you have to store them out of the way, as I did, it's no fun to lug them all the way to the bottom of the garden.

And it's hard to find the time because setting up involves complicated things like polar alignment, a dizzying array of software interfaces, and about a thousand cables. Then, by the time you're done, it's cloudy, it's 2 a.m., and YOU HAVE LITERALLY ACHIEVED NOTHING TONIGHT.

All of which is a very long-winded way of explaining why the ZWO Seestar S50 has changed my (astrophotographic) life.

A Seestar is born

By the end of 2023, I'd given up on astrophotography because it was too much trouble, but then I read about the ZWO Seestar S50 and decided to give it another try.

Here was a smart telescope that would make it easy for me to take photos of the sky. It promised to combine the camera, telescope, and mount in one package and let me control it all from the comfort of my lounge via an iPad. It has a 250mm focal length and 50mm aperture and takes full HD photos via a Sony IMX462 sensor. All pretty decent.

The 64GB of storage and 6,000mAh are bonuses, too. The whole thing is small enough to pack into a travel case and weighs only 2.5kg. Plus, I was already well aware of ZWO, a Chinese company that has long made some of the best dedicated astrophotography cameras. Best of all, it was reasonably affordable, at $550 / £500.

Critics online worried that it wouldn't take great photos, given the price and relatively modest specs of the camera, mount, and lens.

For starters, it was an alt-azimuth mount – the simplest type, which would only let me take photos of 10 seconds or so before star trailing was apparent. My equatorial mount, in comparison, could shoot for minutes at a time, capturing many more photons each time for better image quality.

However, I'm a big fan of that old adage that the best camera is the one you have with you. I'd rather take average photos every three nights than great photos once every three years.

Inevitably, the UK was shrouded by clouds for the first few nights after it was delivered, but eventually I got my chance to try it out – and wow!

Set up was a cinch; the software is incredibly intuitive, and hardware-wise I simply needed to screw the supplied tripod into the telescope unit. Within about 10 minutes, it was set up and snapping away.

The Seestar S50 works by taking multiple photos of your target and' stacking' them together to reveal the details.

I could go into extensive detail about how this works, but all you really need to know is that by combining dozens (or even hundreds, or thousands) of individual images, you can reduce the noise and increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

This is vital because deep space objects are a long, long way away and often incredibly faint. A single photo usually shows little more than a vague smudge, particularly if, like me, you live in a heavily light-polluted area.

By stacking many photos, you reduce all of the noise and bring out the details. The GIF above shows the process in action on my Seestar S50, albeit sped up; to get that kind of detail in reality would take about 20-30 minutes, depending on how dark your skies are.

The Seestar S50 does all of this for you; you can literally watch the object appear in front of you, without needing to touch a thing after choosing your target. It's like magic.

Choosing the target is easy, too, because the Seestar app has a full Sky Atlas built in. This contains thousands of suitable targets arranged into categories; you can simply click on the one you want to image and let it do the rest.

Of course, you can make things more complicated if you want to. For starters, ZWO has added multiple new features via firmware updates.

Among these are the ability to take mosaic photos – so you can image much larger objects, such as the Rosette nebula or Andromeda galaxy – and a planning option to enable you to set up a sequence of targets throughout the night, so you can go to bed and let it do its thing.

The best – and most complicated – is the relatively recent addition of an EQ mode. This lets the Seestar S50 act as if it were an equatorially mounted telescope and, therefore, take longer exposures.

This requires a little more set-up time, as you now need to polar align – something I thought I'd left in the past. However, the software walks you through the process, and I still found it a lot easier than I had with my old rig. You will also need to invest in an equatorial wedge or pan-head tripod to use it.

The results are worth it, though. One drawback of the Seestar S50 compared to more expensive set-ups is that it can take a long time to get a decent number of frames.

In alt-azimuth mode, the tracking is nowhere near as accurate as that of an EQ telescope. This means that about one in every three frames has star trailing and is automatically discarded by the stacking software. This adds a lot of time to the process of getting a good photo.

In EQ mode, however, it tracks far more accurately, meaning you can capture more data – or more targets – in a night. Anyone who lives under cloud-infested skies will appreciate that advantage.

Heavenly bodies

None of that would matter if the results were not good enough to want to share with people, though. Fortunately, they are – but there is a caveat here.

Astrophotography is only half about the actual photography part, with the other bit being the image processing.

The Seestar S50 serves up pretty good out-of-camera images, doing the stacking for you and giving you recognizable results. But they are noisy, particularly if you don't have dark skies. Nor is this surprising; pro and semi-pro astrophotographers use cooled cameras with large sensors, and the Seestar S50 has neither of those.

The solution is to process the images after they've been taken, ideally using specialist astro-processing software. I use a program called Pixinsight, which is an absolute must for anyone who wants the best results, albeit expensive.

Free alternatives are available, though, and you can also improve images using Photoshop and Lightroom. Anything that can remove noise and fiddle with levels will have a positive effect.

The image below of the IC 434 region and majestic Horsehead nebula shows the difference before and after processing. Pretty cool, right?

Honestly, I spend almost as much time processing images as I do taking them. But I still have so much to learn; this is a hobby that could easily eat up all of your free time if you allow it to.

Still, I'm pleased with what I've achieved. The photo of the Rosette nebula below is now my favorite image I've taken, although I know I can improve it if I add more data and re-process it. It will never be as good as I want it to be.

I'm also pleased with my version of the Cone nebula. The Seestar S50 has three built-in filters – one UV/IR Cut filter, one dark filter, and a dual-band anti-light pollution filter. You can turn the latter on or off depending on the target, and with nebula such as the Cone the dual-band filter really helps to bring out the swirling clouds of dust and gas.

The S50 also does pretty well with star clusters such as M67, but unfortunately my processing skills are not yet up to the job of doing them justice. Either that or my focus is not quite right, but they always appear softer than I'd like them to be.

Likewise, the image of the Whirlpool galaxy, M51, is a bit soft. With more data, I'm pretty sure I could bring out more detail in the dust lanes swirling around the galactic center on a clear night or two. I'm not happy with the stars, either; I'm never happy with my stars.

The Seestar S50 is not the telescope to buy if you want to take photos of the planets – the focal length, aperture and sensor are not suited to it. But you can try, and I'm still ridiculously proud of my Jupiter considering it's little more than a yellow-y smudge.

But look, you can see Jupiter's bands! I took that! From my garden just outside of London! That will never not be exciting.

It does much better with the moon (which is easy) and the sun. For the latter, you use the supplied solar filter. I managed to get a lovely timelapse of the recent solar eclipse using it, and even on a standard day, it's fascinating to look at sunspots and how they change.

I'm well aware that my photos are not the best, not even close to it. I need to get much better at processing and move away from all of this light pollution. I'll almost certainly upgrade from the Seestar S50 when I have more time and money.

ZWO has already released a sequel, the even smaller and cheaper S30, and recently announced the S30 Pro – which takes that model's wider field of view and adds a much better (and newer) sensor. I'm quite tempted by that, but will probably wait for the rumored S50 Pro.

But whatever I buy, the Seestar S50 has taught me one thing: smart telescopes are here to stay. Anything that brings the wonders of the skies to more people is to be applauded, and the S50 is a true game changer in that regard. I can't praise it highly enough.

I grew up studying astronomy the old-fashioned way – pointing my dad’s great big telescope upwards in a remote field, with nothing but the stars to guide us. Back then, you used a star chart instead of your phone, along with a healthy dose of can-do attitude to spot the astral body of your choice – if the bitter cold of the night air didn’t get to you first.

However, it’s been years since I scoped the cosmos, so I jumped at the opportunity to pack up and head to the countryside to demo a new AI refractor telescope, the BeaverLAB Finder TW2.

It’s a pretty novel device, and one that sparked real excitement in someone who had only used one telescope before. More thrilling still, the TW2 comes with its own custom-made planetary camera to make astrophotography possible, if you don’t have one of the best cameras for photography or best smartphones.

It’s unfortunate, then, that both the approach and execution of this telescope is so middling. While a younger child might benefit from its simple interface, lightweight frame and all-in-one package, the fun will likely stop as soon as you approach pre-teen age, when you’re likely to develop a more discerning eye for camera and device quality.

Fly me to the moon

Let’s begin with the positives, because I do think the Finder TW2 could and should be an option for some. The telescope itself offers a f/6.1 aperture, 500 mm / 19.69-inch optical length and 29x optical magnification, measuring 190 x 85mm / 48 x 3.4 inches.

Included with the telescope is a tripod, finderscope, the Starlight Camera DS1 with 4x digital zoom (manufactured by dash cam-maker Novatek), solar lens, remote control, bag, and star chart – meaning everything you need to set up and enjoy the view quickly. Considering it costs just $499 / £378, that’s a pretty impressive feat.

The choice to include a camera is a sensible one, given the primary audience seems to be first-timers who might not want to invest in a full camera setup or a smartphone adapter – or, indeed, if they’re too young to use either. The DS1 camera is decent, if not a little bulky and un-sexy, and features a five-inch fold-out screen with touch controls. Note that it will work with any telescope that takes 1.25-inch eyepieces, meaning if you do decide to upgrade your setup having dabbled with the TW2 for a bit, then you at least have some of the pricier hardware covered.

The TW2 can record both 3840 × 2160 resolution still images and 4K video at 60/30/25/24fps. It offers 30GB of built-in storage, or you can use the BeaverLAB app to download your snaps straight to your phone… if you can get it to work – which, as of the time of writing, I managed only after a month of testing.

The full TW2 package comes with a handy carry bag and the telescope itself is impressively lightweight, too. While that does come at the expense of build quality, it’s a whole lot easier to trek into a field with the Finder TW2 than the bulky, heavy kit more seasoned astrophotographers might be used to. This prioritization of ease of use extends to the setup process, too. Simply follow the given instructions to attach the main telescope body, the scope and the camera, and you’re pretty much good to go.

In particular, the BeaverLAB Finder TW2 is a great lunar and solar telescope for beginners. I captured some decent shots of the moon in my time with it, although it wasn’t always easy (more on that later). Clarity isn’t incredible, but it’s certainly far better than the results most people can achieve with their smartphone pressed against a telescope eyepiece.

Within the camera settings are a litany of modes and tools to improve your results, most notable of which are its AI-powered tools, from simpler options such as dehazing and noise reduction, to Color Correction Matrix (CCM) and Chromatic Aberration Correction. In particular, these come in handy for working around some of the limitations of the physical hardware. Still, its software can’t change the ultimate truth that this telescope won’t be winning your astrophotography a spot on our sister-site space.com’s homepage any time soon.

Let me play among the stars

So, why exactly does the TW2 find itself falling short of my expectations? Yes, it’s a budget device and yes, that naturally means there will be concessions made with regards to quality; but unfortunately, the TW2 Finder just isn’t able to justify its flaws.

Setup is easy enough, but when it actually comes to navigating the night sky, things aren’t so simple. The manual controls are very jaunty and imprecise, with the scope slumping as soon as it’s locked onto its target; issues that could be remedied by fine-tuning tools that are sadly absent from the TW2. Plus, the finder placement is awkward and doesn’t align with the main positioning of the body, making it pretty much useless barring finding the general area you want to view. “AI-powered” the camera may be, but the telescope itself is severely lacking in navigation smarts, and could really benefit from object tracking given its less than ideal controls.

That cheaper build quality also becomes imminently noticeable when you try to capture anything smaller than the Sun or Moon. Unfortunately, the telescope is also so light and cheaply constructed that it’s rarely entirely stable, meaning the majority of your shots will come out blurry. I tried snapping a few images of Vega, and was rewarded with a blown-out and soft-blue splodge surrounded by fainter stars that my naked eye could see far better; it’s by no means a terrible shot, but it underdelivers on BeaverLAB’s promise of seeing the stars “like you have never seen them before.”

The shakiness is especially problematic if you try to use the camera touchscreen to snap a shot. After much trial and error, I gave up using the on-device controls altogether and switched to the included remote control clicker (which then proceeded to face pairing issues), before moving to use my phone as a viewfinder and capture button – rather defeating the object of my intended return to more traditional means of astronomy.

All of this means that to capture a half-decent shot, especially of moving targets such as the Moon, you’ll need to anticipate where in frame it will appear roughly a minute ahead of time, before adjusting the telescope to be higher to compensate for the droop, focusing the lens as best you can and tweaking any settings on the camera itself. Then, you’ll have to wait 30-40 seconds for any wobbling to stop, snapping as quickly and frantically as you can using the clicker or your phone – a less than ideal method, to say the least, and certainly not the peaceful, reflective experience I love so much about astronomy.

I was also alarmed when, at one point, the camera detached itself and crashed to the ground, despite my having carefully affixed it. This happened only once, with fairly regular use over a few weeks, so I’m inclined to assume it was a very unlikely accident; but it’s worth noting, nonetheless.

The software isn’t much to write home about, either. Pairing was a little tedious, but not too difficult; however, the user interface definitely leaves you wanting. Its performance is incredibly unreliable, frequently crashing and requiring to be restarted. Considering the wobbling issues presented whenever the camera is operated manually, it’s also a shame the app doesn’t allow you to change the camera settings, offering remote viewing, capture and digital zoom exclusively.

Many text fields are truncated and impossible to read, there are multiple places where Chinese Mandarin characters are in place of English language, and the guides only really help you with the most basic issues you could probably figure out for yourself – rather than providing insight on some of the telescope’s more advanced settings and tools. More damningly, the photo download feature in the app didn’t work for my first month of testing, and only very recently allowed me to access my shots.

Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter or Mars

After all the heartache, you can get pretty decent shots of the Moon and Sun with the TW2. A lot of the images of the Moon taken without AI assistance displayed issues with chromatic aberration (which explains the inclusion of the AI-powered Chromatic Aberration Correction tool) and generally looked soft and slightly unfocused. Nevertheless, it’s always breathtaking to get up close and personal with these celestial bodies.

The included solar filter allowed me to look at the Sun, although weather conditions meant I couldn’t get a clear photo (our sister-sites Space, T3 and Digital Camera World did, however). It was a first-time experience I greatly enjoyed; however, the issues with the finderscope and lack of fine-tuning made it incredibly difficult to get a good shot.

Still, I’d say the BeaverLAB Finder TW2 is a decent enough option for at least some people. Those just starting out and on a budget, or young children, could benefit from the all-in-one package. However, there are also many alternatives at the same price point that can really go the distance.

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Telescopes are evolving, and their appeal is ever widening, and the Vaonis Hestia is the perfect example. It was first announced almost a year ago, billed as the world's first smartphone-based telescope. It's supposed to make astronomy more accessible than ever – and I've been putting it through its star-gazing paces.  

The Hestia is a fresh take within a wave of new smart telescopes entering the world of astronomy in the last couple of years: Vaonis itself already makes the Vespera smart telescope, which can automatically detect what's visible in deep space at any given moment based on your location, and automatically shift its orientation to give you a closer look at your chosen galaxy, nebulae or distant planet. Oh, and it takes pictures too – it's astrophotography made easy.

The Vaonis Hestia is a simpler and significantly cheaper offering than Vespera – you have to do the hard work manually finding distant objects in the skies above, and its magnification is just 25x. However, for astrophotography novices it's the sensible option.

One reason is that it's cheap: the Hestia kit, which includes a tripod, is only $399 / £329. That's much cheaper than the best smart telescopes, which are typically 10x the cost. You can save a little by purchasing the Hestia without a tripod if you already have your own; however the Vaonis' tripod is custom-designed for the Hestia.

'Smartphone-based' means the Hestia utilizes your smartphone's camera, rather than featuring its own image sensor and built-in memory. That's certainly a factor in keeping down costs, and the best cameraphones are pretty darn good these days anyway, so the design choice makes perfect sense.

I was getting superb photos of the moon with the Hestia in no time at all – images that would otherwise have been impossible to capture simply by pointing my phone up at the night sky.

The product was actually brought to market in time for the Great North American Eclipse in April, and our US Mobile Editor Phil Berne took it along for the ride when he photographed the eclipse, complete with a solar filter (an added extra).

As for my own experience starting out with the Vaonis Hestia, well, it was a mixed bag.

Getting started with the Hestia

The Vaonis Hestia is a book-like device with a small eyepiece on its top to help you position your smartphone's camera lens onto for close-up views of the sun, moon, and deep space. I started out with a full moon, as it's the easiest object to locate in the night sky.

You secure your phone in position by adjusting the two magnetic brackets that snap onto the Hestia. It's essentially a universal bracket that can hold any regular phone, though you might struggle with a chunkier foldable phone. My personal handset is a Google Pixel 6, which slotted in fine.

It takes a little fiddling to adjust the Hestia's angle using the tripod head to get the moon centrally in your shot – there are no fine-point adjustments, so it's a bit trial-and-error. At 25x magnification, any slight adjustment throws the composition right off, plus, the moon quickly moves out of your frame, so you'll need to regular make tweaks.

Such high magnifications are also an advantage if you're a fan of timelapses: the moon will work its way from one side of your view to the other in a matter of minutes. If you include details such as trees or buildings in the frame, around and in front of the moon (easily done at moonrise or moonset), your photos and timelapses will only be more dynamic for it.

You can use your regular camera app to take pictures. However, the optical construction of the Hestia flips the image of the moon, which isn't corrected on your smartphone – you'll need to fire up Vaonis' Gravity app to optimize and correct the image.

The flipside of optimizing your image in the Gravity app is that photo resolution isn't as high as it is using your phone's camera app – I really wish my photos had more pixels for even better detail.

When you're ready to take your first photo of the moon, you simply press the photo button and, a few seconds later, after the app stablizes the image, your first photo pops up on screen – and wow!

Detail is super-impressive (see below). You can make out craters and surface details that are otherwise imperceivable to the naked eye or by zooming in with your phone (even Samsung Galaxy's Space Zoom – and photos made with the Vaonis Hestia are for real).

It took me just a few minutes from opening the app from scratch to get the absorbing photo above – impressive stuff. However, I started running into a few issues when trying out the various shooting options within the Android version of the Gravity app, using my Pixel 6.

Superb hardware, but an app that needs refining

The experience might vary between iOS and Android versions of the app, and depending on which handset you use. I only tried Hestia with my Pixel 6, and my experience was mixed.

My first photos of the moon were superb. I needed to make a quick white balance adjustment because the moon was too warm, and manually tweak the exposure because the auto mode often rendered the moon too bright in the frame, but these adjustments in the app and a basic editor are easy to do, and by and large I was able to work the Hestia just fine for single-shot photos, and the results were brilliant.

I then tried the timelapse mode. It should be possible to create a timelapse of the moon working its way across the entire shot in a matter of minutes – but I couldn't do it.

It appears that you have to manually take each photo in a timelapse sequence, which is a real pain – who wants to tap the photo button every 10 seconds over the course of 10 minutes? Between starting and ending a sequence, a timelapse mode should be automated.

Even if I'd had the patience to take a photo once every 10-20 seconds for an entire sequence, I couldn't have done so because the app kept freezing, getting stuck during the process of stabilizing the image.

The highest number of photos I got in a timelapse sequence before the app froze was six or so – hardly enough for a dynamic timelapse. It even froze for single-shot photos many times, and I regularly needed to close and reopen the app.

Once I'd had my fill of shooting the moon I moved onto the deep-space mode. You get a list of galaxies, nebulae and distant planets, together with info about which ones are visible based on your time and location.

However, the hard work of locating those deep-space objects is down to you, and it's the old-school dumb telescope method. The thrill of the chase will suit some, but you don't get the smart-telescope automated convenience, nor is there detailed guidance on how to find any given object.

Beyond shooting the sun and moon, Hestia demands a steep learning curve for beginners. I've consequently limited my experience with Hestia to the moon, and will attempt to explore deep space with Hestia another day, hopefully once a few quirks and technical hitches of the Gravity app have been ironed out.

I still recommend the Vaonis Hestia, especially for moon closeups. If you're like me, you'll soon get hooked on capturing the moon in its various phases – I just can't guarantee what experience you'll have beyond that.

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I’m out in the countryside on a cold clear winter’s night, there's a waxing crescent moon and the stars are vividly bright. Why am I standing around slowly freezing? It’s because I have the Unistellar Odyssey Pro smart telescope and it’s my first night out stargazing with it.

Unistellar’s latest product range is part of a new breed of ‘smart’ telescopes. Odyssey and Odyssey Pro were announced at CES 2024 and they’re pretty pricey – the pro version I have, which includes an eyepiece, is $3,999 / £3,499, while the standard eyepiece-less version costs $2,499 / £2,199.  

What smart telescopes do is make stargazing easier than ever and Unistellar’s new range is child’s play compared to traditional telescopes, even for someone like me with limited telescope experience. 

Boasting cutting-edge 'smart star finder' tech and high-quality Nikon optics, the Odyssey Pro is designed for both near- and deep-space viewing, either through its eyepiece or from your paired device – even from the comfort of your sofa. Smart truly is the word, as I was soon to find out.

Up and in awe in minutes

Establishing a wireless connection with a camera is rarely a smooth process, but the Unistellar Odyssey Pro is an altogether different experience. Download Unistellar’s app, which is available for iOS and Android, pair your device with your smart telescope in the app, configure the telescope's location, then hit ‘Watch’ and away you go. 

The app guides you through the simple process, and lists the solar systems, galaxies, stars and nebulae that are viewable from your position at that moment in time. From my position and hour, the M42 Great nebula in Orion and Jupiter were the obvious big hitters to zone in on. 

After picking the celestial body you’d like to observe, the Odyssey Pro automatically finds it for you in the night sky using what Unistellar simply calls a 'smart star finder'. I started with the M42 nebula and after a minute ‘slewing’, a white dot appeared on my phone’s display and through the scope's eyepiece – an undeveloped image of the nebula.

To develop the image, there’s a timer that essentially does a long exposure photo. Once you start the timer, more detail appears in your display. For observation of the M42 Great nebula in Orion I found around two minutes was enough to get a fully developed image, but for the best quality photos – the Odyssey Pro can shoot 4.1MP JPEGs – you’ll probably want a much longer exposure, especially for less active objects.

Connection between the cleanly designed Odyssey Pro and my smart device proved quick and reliable, and the app works seamlessly. From getting started to being wowed by the vastness of deep space takes a matter of minutes even for a newbie. It’s all very impressive. 

Around 5,000 celestial bodies on demand

Unistellar has created a super-informative app, with detailed information for up to 5,000 celestial bodies. While the scope is fine tuning its aim using its built-in star tracker tech, you get the headlines on screen about your chosen solar system, galaxy star or nebula. Swipe down your screen and there’s pages of info.

Unless you’re a seasoned astronomer or astrophotographer, you’ll probably want to soak this info in. Enjoying the image is one thing, but absorbing the information about it really hits home. I learn that the M42 Great nebula in Orion is 1,344 light years away. Although light years is technically a method of calculating vast distances, it also helps us understand the time taken for light to travel to you in that moment. The image of M42 that I'm looking at in the moment is from 1,344 years ago. Mind blown.

After M42 I zone in on Jupiter, which can be seen from Earth without a telescope as one of the brightest objects in the night sky. The Jupiter image produced by the Odyssey Pro is tiny, and I can imagine following prolonged use that I'd wish to see a more detailed image of such things. 

Photo resolution is also rather modest for a $4,000 / £3,500 telescope – the Odyssey Pro shoots 4MP JPEGs. Even some cheap smart telescopes such as the crowdfunded Vaonis Hestia will shoot at around 2MP. That said, at around 14.3lbs/6.5kg for the combined kit, including the supplied tripod, it's gear that can easily be moved around. 

Are smart telescopes too easy?

With the process so quick, smart telescopes in general are almost too easy. I remember fine-tuning a friend’s traditional telescope over a long time to locate and to track an easy-to-find nebula. There was heightened pleasure in the pursuit and the challenge. The Odyssey Pro does the hard work for you and within a minute, without your own intervention, it’s pointing and tracking your chosen celestial body. 

Photos are automated, too. The timer does its thing and you can select any moment during the long exposure to take a photo, however many times you like. You can fine tune the photo with exposure compensation to make the image lighter or darker, and make micro adjustments to the composition if you’d rather the object wasn't centered. 

This is stargazing and astrophotography made easy, but I think beginners will continue to find interest in this nighttime hobby. Throughout different times of the year there are new objects to look at based on your location, so you won’t get bored. And if this is your introduction to deep space, then it’s a fast track to greater knowledge and actual experience. 

If you’re looking for smart tech with a difference, then this telescope is fun, easy, and most importantly... it's a window to the awe-inspiring distant celestial wonders. 

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Smart telescopes are all the rage in the stargazing world, and they're probably the future of astrophotography. Now Unistellar has cemented its position in this field with the dual launch of the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro at CES 2024. 

They're strikingly similar to the Celestron smart telescope that was also announced at CES, and what’s neat about Unistellar’s Odyssey and Odyssey Pro is that they're controlled remotely using a newly developed Unistellar app. 

From the comfort of your sofa you can view what your Odyssey telescope sees on your smart device, and control which part of the night sky it's aimed at, using the telescope’s ‘autonomous field detection technology’, which Odyssey also calls a ‘smart star finder’. 

The makers say the new GPS-equipped smart telescopes can “autonomously point towards and track any desired celestial object from the moment they are turned on, so you can be admiring outer space in just a couple of minutes.“ In short, it’s stargazing made easy.

Unistellar innovation meets Nikon optics

Unistellar is a familiar name in the astrophotography world – it launched the Unistellar eQuinox 2 at last year’s CES, and also makes the mighty eVscope 2 (yours for $4,999 / £3,999 / about AU$6,500). This year’s models are much smaller and lighter and have a wider appeal, thanks in part to what Unistellar calls ‘Multi-Depth Technology’, which enables you to instantly switch between viewing nearby planets and faraway galaxies and nebulae.

You can easily choose what to look at via the Unistellar app for iOS and Android, with handy info about each of the 5000-plus planets and nebulae in the app database for newbies and enthusiasts to absorb, too.

Nikon has brought its lens making expertise to the table in these new smart telescopes too, designing the high-precision autofocus optics used in both models, and the electronic eyepiece found in the Pro model only – ideal for those who prefer to get hands on with their telescope. On the technical front, both models have a field of view of 34 x 45 arcmin, an 85mm mirror diameter and a 320mm focal length. There's more info on the Unistellar website.

At 4kg, the Odyssey and Odyssey Pro are much lighter than Unistellar’s previous offerings in the Expert range, and come supplied with a sturdy tripod, although their five-hour battery life doesn’t compare. Both models are available from the Unistellar website or camera retailers – the Odyssey will set you back $2,499 / £2,199 (about AU$3,750) while the pricier Odyssey Pro costs $3,999 / £3,499 (about AU$6,000). That’ll count out most people, but Unistellar has nonetheless transformed the experience of getting lost among the stars.

We’re covering all of the latest CES news from the show as it happens. Stick with us for the big stories on everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.

And don’t forget to follow us on TikTok for the latest from the CES show floor!

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• The Vaonis Hestia telescope could be the ultimate smartphone accessory for astronomy novices
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We’re all stargazers at heart, staring up into inky space while unknowable stars blink back at us, and most of us would like to see more but don't feel confident using a complicated standard telescope. I’m certainly one of those people, which is why I’m so interested in the Celestron Origin, an app and phone-connected AI-enhanced telescope that the company has unveiled at CES 2024 in Las Vegas.

Blessed with a 335mm focal length (your degree of magnification is determined in part by this) and a new 6.4MP Sony IMX178 CMOS sensor, the Celestron Origin sounds capable of producing some excellent astral images. Naturally, the Celestron name adds some weight to the whole thing; the one truly excellent telescope I've owned, back in the 1980s, was made by the 64-year-old company.

Still, decent optics alone would not make this two-foot-long tube stand out. It’s the digital, AI, and automation chops that should excite most amateur stargazers, especially, those who’ve never tried using a telescope.

The self-contained, battery-operated (there's AC support, too) telescope is controlled with an iOS- and Android-compatible app, rather than with your gaze and by fiddling with fine controls. The Celestron Origin knows more about the night sky than you do, and can handle alignment, focus (thank goodness), location, and identification of night-sky objects, and track what you want to track.

I’ve always found the best star, planet, and galaxy gazing is done during some of the coldest nights of the year. Yes, I’ve stood atop forlorn hills shivering while an astronomy group clustered around one excellent telescope to see Saturn’s rings. The Celestron Origin, though, offers a different approach. It lets you schedule your star gazing, choosing in advance which objects you want it to find and track, and you can watch what it finds on your iPhone from the comfort of your couch. Celestron also suggests that you could easily screen-mirror the app's details to your favorite big-screen TV.

This does sound like a whole new way to get into astronomy, with all the benefits of seeing distant planets up close without the frustration of a typical telescope. Celestron notes that the telescope’s AI image process brings “celestial objects from deep space to your smartphone,” but it’s not clear if the system is using the AI to enhance images, or just to more quickly and accurately find stars, planets, and constellations; as something of a night-sky purist, I hope it's the latter. We do know that the Celestron’s intelligence is powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B computer.

There are a pair of USB-A ports on the telescope for grabbing raw images of the telescope’s findings directly from the sensor, and there’s even an Ethernet port if you want to get the Celestron Origin onto your network. You can plug it into a standard 120V outlet, although the onboard battery will, according to Celestron, last six hours, more than enough for a night of star gazing.

It's a hefty system, weighing over 40lbs / 18kg when fully assembled (much of that weight is the automated, motorized mount and tripod), and standing 48 inches high. You’ll probably want a carrying case for the unit.

Celestron has set the price at an eye-watering $3,999 – although that's not unreasonable for this class of telescope – with global availability in Q2 of this year. You might want to start saving now.

We’re covering all of the latest CES news from the show as it happens. Stick with us for the big stories on everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.

And don’t forget to follow us on TikTok for the latest from the CES show floor!

We’re still reveling in Perseids meteor shower glory, so naturally a project from an established telescope maker has caught our attention. The Vaonis Hestia ‘smart’ telescope is one to watch, with its Kickstarter finishing on August 17.  

So far, more than 10,000 people have backed the Hestia to the tune of over $2.5 million, and there’s every reason to believe this compelling cameraphone accessory – which Vaonis describes as the first-ever smartphone-based telescope – will find its way into the hands of backers, given that the company has already delivered two ambitious telescopes to market, namely the Vespera and Stellina. 

But what is Hestia, and why is it such an exciting prospect? 

Stargazing for all

France-based Vaonis has been disrupting the telescope market, evolving the design of these stargazing devices into something more compact, slick, and connected to create what it calls ‘smart’ telescopes.

The Vaonis Vespera and Stellina do away with the traditional telescope eyepiece and instead connect to your phone to view the skies above, via Vaonis’ Gravity app. But at $1,499 (£1,200 and AU$2,400 approx) and $3,999 (£3,150 and AU$6,200 approx) respectively, their appeal is limited to enthusiasts or those flush with cash. The Hestia also connects to your phone, but it’s altogether different in that it uses your cameraphone to take pictures. 

A first glance the Hestia doesn’t scream telescope. It’s the size of a book, with magnetic brackets that snap into place to hold your phone and line its camera lens up with its ocular, which provides a 25x magnification for your camera phone, and what Vaonis claims is a 5x sharper image.

You’ll be able to observe the moon close up, the ‘once in a lifetime’ complete solar eclipse across North America in April 2024, and even more distant planets. 

Vaonis says it takes a couple of minutes to align your phone, while its Gravity app boasts super-sophisticated astronomy tools to compose your sky shots. Overall, the Hestia should be absolute child’s play for astrophotography using your iOS or Android device, with handsets up to five years old being compatible.

Here’s the best part: the Hestia ‘Solo Pack’ will only cost $249 (£200 / AU$400 approx) when it comes to market, which is pocket change compared to Vaonis' other offerings; and Kickstarter backers can get a 20% discount before 3pm BST on August 17 (7am PDT / 10am EST / midnight AEST. A costlier ‘Standard Pack’ adds a tripod, while the ‘Solar Pack’ also includes a hard case and a solar filter – all important for that solar eclipse event next year. At the time of writing, delivery is scheduled for December 2023, and 'guaranteed' for the aforementioned US solar eclipse.

The Hestia may lack the sophisticated motorized tools of the Vespera and Stellina, which utilize your phone’s GPS to track specific features in our skies, but it promises to be the smart telescope for everyone, and we think it could be. We're aiming to get hands-on with it soon and share our real-world experience – if it lives up to expectations we might just see an explosion of novice astrophotographers next year and beyond. 

If you look up at the night sky, you might see some stars, even a bright planet and, of course, the moon. You won't see galaxies and the billions of stars that are sharing the universe with those brighter objects. That's because studies show 80% of the world's population lives under light-polluted skies. At CES 2023, Unistellar is showing off a smart telescope that appears to beat back the light and reveal the wonders of the universe to anyone.

The new eQuinox 2 is a 400x telescope - upgraded from the original model with a better photo sensor and a wider field of view - that features no discernible knobs or user controls. The gray, sleek optical device caught my eye on the first press night of CES. At roughly two feet in length, it's obviously a stargazer, but the lack of physical controls might confuse you. It shouldn't.

Unistellar showed me how you can use the associated app (on a phone or tablet) to control the motorized telescope. On a tablet, you can select the Orion Nebula and the smart telescope uses your phone's GPS to know where it is on Earth and where to point the optics. I watched as they tapped an on-screen stellar object and the eQuinox 2 rotated to face the Nebula.

Because we were inside a convention hall, Unistellar couldn't live demo its secret sauce, but they walked me through a simulation.

On an iPad screen, they selected the Whirlpool Galaxy, and the telescope silently rotated to the proper position. After a few moments, I saw an on-screen image, but no galaxy. This is where things get interesting. Because of light pollution, standard telescopes can, unless you trek to the most remote areas, struggle to see many astronomical objects.

eQuinox 2 uses Smart Light Pollution Reduction, an AI and algorithmically based system that digitally corrects the images to remove the effects of light pollution. The Unistellar rep tapped a button and then I watched the on-screen image resolve until we could see the beautiful, tiny swirly galaxy millions of miles away from us. 

"It wasn't that it wasn't there, it was that we needed to clean it with an algorithm to make it accessible," Unistellar's rep told me. He added that it was hidden because of the light pollution, but also because it's a faint object. What's not entirely clear is how much of what eQuinox 2 shows you with the Smart Light Pollution Reduction is optical and what is a digital concoction of the algorithm based on what it knows the galaxy looks like.

The app comes pre-loaded with 500 celestial objects and suggestions for finding more, but you will not be hand-adjusting the telescope to find them. eQuinox 2 is 100% app controlled. That probably makes it a good fit for amateurs, but maybe not semi-pro astronomers.

eQuinox 2 is now on pre-order for $2,499 (€2,499 in Europe) and ships in early 2023.

Check out our CES 2023 hub for all the latest news from the show as it happens. We'll be covering everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, and smart home gadgets, so stick with us for the big stories.

Ever since Neil Armstrong took his ‘small step for man’, the visual identity of space exploration has been powered by data.

Indeed, space’s accessibility has always revolved around the significance and distribution of space photography to the masses, inspiring future engineers and scientists the world over.

Techniques have evolved from pointing a camera out of a space shuttle window to encompassing mirrors and telescopes, thereby capturing subjects at enormous distances. But to share these accomplishments, space agencies have had to resolve multiple data and photographic challenges.

From the original Apollo 17 Blue Marble image (1972) to the first images produced of the Carina Nebula by the James Webb Space Telescope (2022), data and data storage has had a crucial role in facilitating these incredible findings and explorations.

More waves than the Pacific

Outer space is volatile and beautiful. It’s harsh and its weather unpredictable, so to capture its subject matter you need robust R&D, variable techniques and data solutions. 

Large swathes of the universe – like our own galaxy, the Milky Way – are concealed by cosmic dust, which is impenetrable to visible light. But the discovery that radio waves pass right through cosmic dust has led to their current use in space photography.

UV photography uses ultraviolet radiation to create two-dimensional images of extragalactic stars and planets. And infrared (IR) cameras focus on electrons emitting radiation to capture photos beyond the visible light spectrum. By contrast, radio imaging constructs pictures by sending out radio waves into space which bounce off objects and return to satellite receivers. This data is compiled and creates pixel images of data to create a mosaic.

The required data to construct a single photograph with any one of these techniques is impressive. For example, this image of the center of the Milky Way, was caught by the MeerKAT Radio Telescope in South Africa. The panorama is itself a composition of 20 separate radio wave observations, which required three years of processing and 70 terabytes (TB) of radio wave imagery for that single image.

How much data?

70TB is a lot of data for one image. To put this into perspective, 1TB is enough storage for roughly 20 feature-length films.

Consuming this volume of data isn’t an irregularity. Current ongoing missions are generating these levels consistently, sometimes reaching up to 100TB a day. Furthermore, this data needs to be stored locally during space missions before being transmitted back to Earth for processing.

Data integrity and how to store it has become a unique challenge in outer space. Materials need to endure launch, orbit, and space radiation. The reliability of these materials is mission critical. These missions capture isolated incidents that humanity often has only one shot at seeing and demonstrates just how critical it is that this data returns to Earth in a usable form. 

Trying to transfer this data to a centralized source for processing will potentially cause networks to collapse as single streams of data turn into a flood. This is where NAND flash comes in - a durable, non-volatile, and cost-effective solution. NAND flash is already enabling billions of devices and apps, and storing user data and operating systems here on Earth – maximizing bandwidth utilization and enabling real-time analysis.

Satellites need to withstand the forces of a rocket launch, leaving Earth’s atmosphere, space’s harsh temperatures and galactic cosmic rays. Once the collected data is stored securely, the various space missions wait to transmit the data back to Earth via radio waves. Mission control must monitor the volume and transmission rate to ensure the data’s integrity.

It’s a balancing act – as the data must not exceed the storage capacity of the satellite; whilst also preventing losses during the transmission phase.

To infinity and beyond…

Beyond the benefits for science and business in terms of data storage, space photography is crucial to communicate space missions. The power of imagery is that it's an inclusive medium, which isn’t hindered by technical jargon, complicated mathematics or even translation; it's a completely universal form. 

Space photography shows us what’s beyond our world. A story punctuated by the tireless work of technicians, engineers and scientists the world over. Whilst demonstrating technical advances and feats, space photography is simultaneously inspiring the next generation to come. 

These pictures can be the genesis for many careers in science – whether as an astrophysicist, ecologist or mathematicians. They may not land in space, but those people still land amongst the scientific stars.

• Check out our lists of the best rugged drives and best external hard drives

Is it time you got a ‘smart telescope’? Interest in space and astronomy has never been higher, but if you've ever purchased a telescope you'll know that they are a pain to set up and very often give you poor quality views of the night sky. 

Instead of becoming an expert in the night sky you have to become an expert in how to choose, align and maintain telescopes. It's an easy way to snuff-out a passion for the night sky and, besides, if you live in a city then light pollution can make the hobby even more frustrating.

Cue new smart telescopes from Vanois and Unistellar, which align themselves to the night sky, work autonomously and are controlled solely via a smartphone app. Even better, they cut through like pollution as if it wasn't even there. Smart telescopes are incredible. So why do some people hate them?

Look, no eyepiece

A traditional telescope needs two things; an eyepiece to look through and the clearest, darkest sky possible. Everyone knows that. So how can the future of amateur astronomy be in the hands of a new generation of so-called ‘smart’ telescopes that don’t have eyepieces and consistently kill the user’s night vision? 

Smart telescopes are counter-intuitive because they’re more about images than optics. They focus light onto Sony image sensors. The key products are the flagship Vaonis Stellina and travel-friendly Vaonis Vespera refractor telescopes – the latter launching earlier this month – plus the flagship Unistellar eVscope 2 and more affordable Unistellar eVscope eQuinox reflector telescopes.

What they do is revolutionary. They fetch a connected smartphone’s GPS then auto-align by plate-solving, cross-referencing the positions of stars with a built-in planetarium database. They have a motorized ‘Go To’ system that lets you select targets from a list of what’s visible where you are. 

Their unique trick is that instead of giving users a real-time live view of distant celestial objects through an eyepiece they use pre-determined image settings (for ISO and exposure) and then live image-stack for clarity, pushing ever-improving images to connected smartphones and tablets. 

Technically speaking, smart telescopes are about astrophotography, not observational astronomy. It’s easily possible to put a smart telescope outside and sit inside both controlling what it points at and inspecting its images. From the apps it’s then easy to share the images on social media. 

What about photons?

Some purists are appalled by this. In astronomy photons are everything. When you see an object through a telescope you’re always looking back in time. Sunlight itself takes eight minutes to travel to your eyes from the Sun. From the Andromeda galaxy, it’s 2.5 million years. 

Either way, it’s the miracle of those photons hitting your retinas that’s the real magic of amateur astronomy, right? I sympathize with this argument. Use a smart telescope and you’re not actually seeing objects in the night sky. It’s all rather passive and what you see is just a processed image. 

Some have expressed concern that what you're actually looking at is images downloaded from the Internet, originally taken by, say, the Hubble Space Telescope. That's absolutely not the case because the images produced from smart telescopes are nowhere near that good. 

However, the core of that argument is that if you’re going to sit passively inside looking at a smartphone then you might as well be looking at images on the Internet. Smart telescopes, goes this line of argument, are not about ‘real’ astronomy. But that's not necessarily so. 

Urban myths

The trouble is, most of us don't live under dark rural skies, instead being saddled with light-polluted night skies. Nor do most people have the time or inclination to indulge in ‘proper’ astrophotography (that, yes, can surpass the results you get from smart telescopes). 

For now, smart telescopes are fairly low resolution, topping out at around seven megapixels. Although you can export images in raw formats such as TIFF, it's not really what smart telescopes are about. Yes, for now they are about convenience over quality. There’s no doubt about that. 

However, where they really succeed is in battling light pollution. Light pollution is horrible and, thanks to LED streetlights being installed without any regulation, it’s getting worse. 

Use a traditional telescope in a city and point at, say, the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), a beautiful ‘grand-design’ spiral galaxy 31 million light-years away close to the Plough/Big Dipper. You won't see much. In fact, you'll be lucky to find it at all. That goes the same for most galaxies and all nebulae. But smart telescopes make them look incredible.

Let there be light

Smart telescopes do something no other telescopes can. They see through light pollution. After testing all of the smart telescopes on the market over the past few years, I spent the last month being one of the first reviewers to spend time with the new Vaonis Vespera. 

In terms of quality, it isn't the best smart telescope around. This one is made for travel and convenience like no other, and yet it cuts through pollution with incredible skill. I was able to image the faint Veil Nebula (NGC 6992) in the summer night sky, a supernova remnant that's impossible to see with an optical telescope from where I live in a big city. Ditto the colorful Dumbbell Nebula (M27) and Ring Nebula (M57), two other targets I’ve long tried – and failed – to glimpse in a telescope.

They may be very easy to use but smart telescopes do demand a little patience. While they appear able to image most objects in the deep sky in good quality in about 10 minutes of observations, some of the fainter nebulae demand up to an hour of observations. It's worth the wait because as more and more images are stacked – as often as one every 10 seconds – more detail is revealed.

Smart telescopes are far from perfect. For now, they're incredibly expensive, so unlikely to prove breakthrough products for some time. Worse, they've gotten more expensive recently (along with all kinds of telescopes) because of global inflation and supply chain issues. 

Sensitive to faint objects, smart telescopes don’t give good views of the planets and the moon. When using a smart telescope you have to spend a lot of time looking at your smartphone, so if you love stargazing precisely because it gets you away from your smartphone, then a smart telescope is not for you.

Should you buy a smart telescope?

If you want to get into astrophotography and produce the best pictures possible, you need to go learn about the subject in infinite detail and ultimately invest in a large telescope, a motorized equatorial mount and various astrocameras. 

You also need to be prepared to spend many hours aligning and focusing, and then post-processing your images. However, if you don't have the time or inclination for all that then a smart telescope will get you almost to the same standard with virtually zero effort.

Yes, smart telescopes are way too expensive, for now, but as their sensors improve and resolution increases, easy to use astrophotography devices like these will dominate among time-poor, impatient urban dwellers who nevertheless want to explore the cosmos. 

Eyepiece or not, as light pollution worsens smart telescopes could be the saviors of urban amateur astronomy. 

A new phishing campaign is taking advantage of interest in the images captured by the James Webb telescope to infect victims with malware, analysts have warned.

A report from security firm Securonix found cybercriminals are embedding malware capable of bypassing antivirus filters into an image of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster, published by NASA earlier this year.

Although at first the image appears entirely innocuous, inspecting the file in a text editor reveals code designed to trigger the download of a malicious executable.

James Webb telescope images

In July 2022, NASA released the first selection of images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, detailing the “earliest, rapid phases of star formation” for the first time. The spectacular full-color images spread like wildfire over social media platforms.

However, as with any trend or event that captures the public imagination, the demand for more telescope images has created an opening for cybercriminals.

In this instance, the threat actor distributes a phishing email containing a Microsoft Office attachment. Once downloaded, the attachment triggers a chain reaction that ultimately results in the malicious image making its way onto the victim’s device.

The malware itself, coded in Golang in order to complicate analysis, is said to be capable of exfiltrating sensitive data and handing control of the infected machine to the operator.

To shield against scams of this kind, web users are advised never to download attachments from unsolicited emails and to interrogate messages for errors of spelling or grammar that might betray a scam.

Separately, although the malware strain in question is reportedly able to bypass security measures, devices should nonetheless be protected with leading antivirus and ransomware protection software, which will reduce the overall risk of an infection.

• Also check out our list of the best endpoint protection services

The first image we've seen from the James Webb Space Telescope has been released by NASA, but don't get too excited just yet.

The image, which NASA published online on Friday, shows the star HD 84406 as seen from each of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. At the moment, those segments are not in alignment with each other, so the image effectively shows a single star from 18 different angles.

The challenge is to align each mirror segment so that the star it sees perfectly aligns with the star as seen from the other mirrors – essentially, aligning the mirrors until 18 stars become a single, perfectly overlapping image.

The instrument used to image the star, the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), is one of four light collecting instruments on the Webb telescope, and the test image serves two purposes. 

First, it confirms that light is passing through the entire telescope to the NIRCam sensor, which shows that the telescope actually works. Second, it provides the starting point for the telescope alignment.

As the telescope cools down, we'll hopefully get more images throughout the process as NASA works to aligned each mirror segment in nanometer increments, a process that is expected to take a few months.

Analysis: it's working!

While the first image we've gotten from Webb might not look like much, it's a really big deal. First, it shows the challenge ahead of having to line up each mirror correctly to get the actual images we're looking forward to getting in a few months time.

But most importantly, it shows that light is passing through the entire instrument as it should. While there are three more sensors that need to be tested in the weeks ahead, once the mirrors are aligned, Webb will at least be able to give us much clearer images than we've ever gotten in the near infrared spectrum, which will in itself be a huge boost for astronomy.

"The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding," Marcia Rieke, principal investigator for the NIRCam instrument and regents professor of astronomy, University of Arizona, said in the NASA update. "We were so happy to see that light makes its way into NIRCam."

While the more sensitive, deeper infrared spectrum instruments are what really make Webb the important astronomical tool that we hope it will be, knowing that light is making it to the instruments is exciting news indeed.

• Beyond Webb: why NASA's new $10 billion space telescope is just the beginning

Scientists say they have finally identified a long-sought intermediate-mass black hole for the first time, thanks to their catching it mid-meal.

Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the universe, which makes them such fascinating objects to study. There have been two types of black holes that we've been able to identify so far: stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes.

Stellar-mass black holes are the remains of a star that exhausted its fuel for nuclear fusion and collapsed in on itself. If the star is roughly eight to 15 times the mass of the sun, it erupts in a supernova, leaving the ultra-dense, city-sized remnant of its core behind, known as a neutron star. But if it is between 15 and 100 solar masses, then even the tightly packed core can't withstand the star's collapse and the collapse continues even further, producing a stellar-mass black hole.

Supermassive black holes, meanwhile, are a million solar masses or even greater, and are found in the center of most large galaxies, if not all of them.

But what about the black holes in the middle, between 100 and 1 million solar masses? These are known as intermediate-mass black holes and it has been an open question if such objects even exist – until now.

In a new study in this month's The Astrophysical Journal, a team of University of Arizona (UA) astronomers says that a black hole that was caught shredding apart a star in a so-called tidal disruption event has revealed itself to be a member of this long-elusive class of black hole.

"The fact that we were able to catch this black hole while it was devouring a star offers a remarkable opportunity to observe what otherwise would be invisible," said Ann Zabludoff, a UA professor of astronomy who co-authored the paper. "Not only that, by analyzing the flare we were able to better understand this elusive category of black holes, which may well account for the majority of black holes in the centers of galaxies."

The remains of the dead star caught in the tidal disruption event produced a large amount of X-ray radiation as it was torn apart, known as the J2150 flare, which had been previously observed and recorded. The research team, led by UA astronomer Sixiang Wen, reviewed that data and used it to calculate both the mass and the spin of the black hole that caused it.

"The X-ray emissions from the inner disk formed by the debris of the dead star made it possible for us to infer the mass and spin of this black hole and classify it as an intermediate black hole," Wen said.

While supermassive black holes are the dynamos that power large galaxies like the Milky Way or larger, there are many smaller galaxies that might have these intermediate-mass black holes in their centers.

"We still know very little about the existence of black holes in the centers of galaxies smaller than the Milky Way," said co-author Peter Jonker of Radboud University and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, both in the Netherlands. "Due to observational limitations, it is challenging to discover central black holes much smaller than 1 million solar masses."

• Scientists discover 500 light-year-wide hole in Milky Way torn open by a supernova
• Astronomers finally solve the mystery of a famous 900-year-old Chinese supernova
• Could aliens be using Dyson Spheres around black holes to collect immense power?

Analysis: intermediate-mass black holes are a big deal for physics

One of the reasons intermediate-mass black holes have been sought after for so long is that they could help answer a lot of outstanding questions in physics.

The most obvious would be the origin and evolution of their bigger cousins, the supermassive black holes that play such a key role in galaxy formation. Knowing how supermassive black holes form, and whether they were once intermediate-mass black holes, would tell us a lot about how the universe developed.

Another question it could help solve is the issue of dark matter, which physicists believe makes up more than 80% of all the matter in the universe but which does not interact with light in any way.

Dark matter may be composed of some exotic particle of matter that we've yet to discover, and one such theoretical particle is the ultralight boson, which should have the effect of slowing down the spin of an intermediate-mass black hole.

"If those particles exist and have masses in a certain range, they will prevent an intermediate-mass black hole from having a fast spin," said study co-author Nicholas Stone, a senior lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Yet J2150’s black hole is spinning fast. So, our spin measurement rules out a broad class of ultralight boson theories, showcasing the value of black holes as extraterrestrial laboratories for particle physics."

• Supernova shoots a dying star made of metal out of Milky Way at 2 million mph

Leading off the post-Labor Day science news this week were a couple of newly-announced launch dates for some historic space flights, as well as a new study that examines how a severe solar storm could trigger a months-long internet apocalypse.

Inspiration4 set a tentative launch window for next week while the much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope is finally getting its own launch date for the end of the year.

Speaking of space, a new study explored how an uncommon, but inevitable phenomenon caused by the sun could knock large regions or even entire continents off the internet entirely for weeks or even months, and how we need to prepare for the worst now. 

In the background though was climate change, and specifically how climate change is impacting our world faster than expected and in some surprising ways. A new study found evidence that some animals are growing bigger body parts in response to rising temperatures far faster than scientists realized – but still not fast enough to adapt to a changing climate.

Then, there was the disturbing news that California's Dixie Fire is threatening the Allen Telescope Array and forcing an evacuation of its scientists and staff, disrupting the facility's important work in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

All in all, a pretty full week, so let's dig in.

The sun could knock the internet offline for months with a major solar storm

Scientists and engineers have been worrying about a major solar storm for a long while now, but a new study by an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, spells out some of the very specific risks to our internet infrastructure.

A solar storm – a fairly regular eruption of highly magnetized particles from the sun – isn't dangerous to humans (at least not directly), but it can wreak total havoc on electronics, knocking out entire power grids, and frying electronic devices in areas hit by these particles.

What Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi found in the paper she presented to the SIGCOMM 2021 conference last month was that undersea telecommunications cables, the kind we use to connect the world to a single common internet, are especially vulnerable to a severe solar storm, and should we get hit by one, it could knock entire continents like North America and Europe offline for months.

There are things we can do to mitigate the threat, though, but we have to act now because once we see a solar storm coming, it's far too late to do anything about it.

The James Webb Space Telescope finally gets a launch date this year

The much delayed James Webb Space Telescope is finally getting a launch date for later this year, bringing the next generation observatory that much closer to unlocking the mysteries of the early universe.

The telescope, now scheduled to launch from a European Space Agency spaceport in French Guiana on December 18, 2021.

The space telescope, originally scheduled for an August 2020 launch, will fly into orbit aboard an Adriane 5 rocket, where it will then begin its complex deployment to the second Lagrange point far beyond the moon's orbit and unfurl its mirrors to the universe.

Capable of seeing farther than any observatory ever created, the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to find the oldest galaxies ever formed during the early days of the universe. What else will it be able to see? That's what we're about to find out, starting on December 18, 2021.

Inspiration4 is go for launch!

Inspiration4, the first ever all-civilian space flight mission ever attempted, received a preliminary launch window this week and will take off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than 8PM EDT on September 15.

Being a preliminary launch window, it is obviously subject to change as conditions evolve, but the historic launch is nearly here. Make sure to bookmark our Inspiration4 page for updates on the launch and for a live stream of the event once it becomes available.

Climate change is forcing animals to 'shape-shift' to try to stay ahead of warming temperatures

In sadder news, a new study has found evidence that animals are responding to the fast-changing climate by changing the shape and size of their bodies – though this doesn't mean they are adapting to a warmer world.

The study looked at warm-blooded animals and found larger beaks on birds and larger ears on mammals than samples taken from the same species decades ago, a product of something known as the Allen rule. According to this rule, animals that evolve in colder climates have shorter limbs and appendages than those that evolved in warmer climates to help regulate body heat.

The researchers found that the most pronounced change was in Australian parrots, which saw an increase in beak size between 4% and 10% just since 1871.

While 150 might seem like a long time, this is nothing in the usual geological timescales under which evolution operates. Unfortunately, scientists don't believe that these changes are happening fast enough to matter, or that these changes are even helpful for the species survival.

Dixie Fire in California threatens SETI's Allen Telescope Array

There's even more climate change news this week, this time in the form of California's Dixie Fire, the second-largest wildfire on record in the state, which is now threatening to overrun the Allen Telescope Array (ATA).

ATA is unique in that its primary function is to listen to the stars for the faint radio signals of alien civilizations, using 42 large radio antennas. These antennas are now under direct threat from the Dixie Fire, which as of the time of this writing is just 12 miles away from the facility and heading towards it.

"Anticipating the possibility that [the Dixie Fire] might reach the antennas, the observatory staff contacted the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Department to prepare the site against eventual damage," the SETI Institute said in a statement. "Two teams from the Forest Service, about a dozen people in total, removed brush from near the antennas. Trees in the area were pruned of any branches lower than ten feet above the ground."

Here's hoping that disaster is averted for now, but unless we address the climate crisis, anything we do will just delay an even worse reckoning later.

• Invasive cane toads too deadly even for Australia turn to cannibalism

The million-plus acre Dixie Fire in California is closing in on the Allen Telescope Array, threatening the facility's search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

The SETI Institute, which operates the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), said in a statement that the Dixie Fire now tearing across northern California is just 12 miles from the facility. Given the Dixie Fire's northward movement, Alex Pollak, ATA's Science and Engineering Operations Manager, said that the facility has been evacuated as a precaution and that threat mitigation efforts around the facility's 42 antennas are underway.

"Anticipating the possibility that [the Dixie Fire] might reach the antennas, the observatory staff contacted the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Department to prepare the site against eventual damage," SETI's statement says. "Two teams from the Forest Service, about a dozen people in total, removed brush from near the antennas. Trees in the area were pruned of any branches lower than ten feet above the ground."

ATA is the only facility of its kind whose primary mission is to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial life. Since the types of microwave radio signals monitored by the ATA are not affected by the Earth's atmosphere, its facility does not need to be located at a higher elevation such as mountaintops or mountainous plateaus like mirror-and-lens optical telescopes do.

What it does need, however, is a very radio-quiet region, typically low-population rural areas that are often surrounded by natural pasture and forests. The kind of region that makes detecting the presumably faint radio signals of an alien civilization possible are also the most susceptible to wildfires, unfortunately.

Analysis: no matter what you're doing, climate change is going to disrupt it

Its sometimes difficult to predict how climate change is going to affect our lives because we tend to see the big picture problems like rising temperatures and sea levels, but those big, top line effects have granular, downstream consequences for just about everybody.

If someone said that climate change was going to disrupt the search for alien life, people may not make the connection that California wildfires – exacerbated by the climate crisis – would disrupt the telescope arrays we use to search among the stars.

When we talk about flooding in coastal regions, we don't think about the disruption to industry resulting from essential supply chains being cut off by washed out roads, or the disruption to factories or commercial centers by downed powerlines, line we're seeing in Louisiana right now.

If you think you know how climate change is going to upend your life, you don't; not totally. And you ultimately won't know until something happens and its too late to do anything about it, like watching your farm or property get washed away by higher than expected snow or glacier melt or burned to the ground in an uncontrollable wildfire.

A lot of climate change is already locked in, but there is still time to keep things from getting even worse. We should all probably get on that.

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The long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope has a new end-of-year launch date, NASA confirmed on Wednesday.

In conjunction with the European Space Agency and Canadian Space Agency, NASA will launch the new telescope from a South American launch site in Kourou, French Guiana, on December 18, 2021, in what is going to be one of the most highly anticipated space launches ever.

The new space telescope has passed its final testing and now with the successful July launch of the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry it into orbit, the road is clear for the next-gen space telescope to lift off this year.

Originally slated for an August 2020 launch, the James Webb Space Telescope is set to become the single most powerful telescope humanity has ever put into service; it's expected to be a major step up from the already incredibly powerful Hubble Space Telescope.

"Webb is an exemplary mission that signifies the epitome of perseverance,” Gregory L. Robinson, Webb’s program director at NASA, said. “I am inspired by our dedicated team and our global partnerships that have made this incredible endeavor possible. Together, we’ve overcome technical obstacles along the way as well as challenges during the coronavirus pandemic."

"Now that we have an observatory and a rocket ready for launch, I am looking forward to the big day and the amazing science to come.”

The new telescope is expected to see much farther than even Hubble is capable, capturing the furthest – and thus, oldest – galaxies in our universe as well as providing a fresh look at objects in our own solar system.

Analysis: about as exciting – and tense – a space launch as it gets 

A lot of the most exciting parts of the James Webb Space Telescope are also what makes everything around it so anxiety inducing. 

The extremely delicate deployment of this next-gen telescope will take weeks as it is lifted into space, where it will then be carried 1.5 million kilometers to the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2, where its massive mirrors will unfurl. 

This puts it far beyond the orbit of the moon; the choreography of getting the telescope into position alone is tricky. Then we have to hope that nothing got damaged along the way - since if it did, good luck repairing it.

That said, if everything goes according to plan, we'll be able to see almost as far back into the early universe as physically possible, from today all the way back to the earliest structures that formed after the Big Bang and just about everything in between. High stakes, but high rewards, for sure.

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Scientists have identified a venerable brown dwarf nicknamed 'The Accident' that is almost as old as the universe itself careening through our galactic neighborhood at half a million miles an hour – and it's upending what we thought we knew about these strange, not-quite-a-star-but-not-quite-a-planet space objects.

As LiveScience explains it, brown dwarfs are best thought of as failed stars; seriously massive bodies that range from 13 to 80 times the size of Jupiter, but don't quite have the mass to ignite nuclear fusion in its core to become a star. Instead, their heat dissipates with time, making them little more than stellar embers that are difficult to detect.

The Accident was discovered – you guessed it – by accident by a citizen astronomer named Dan Caselden, who was using a homebrewed online computer program to sift through new astronomical data looking for brown dwarfs. Caselden was studying a completely different group of brown dwarf candidates when The Accident suddenly swooshed into view.

What puzzled scientists about The Accident is that the infrared light if gives off indicates that it is very cold, and so must be very old, but in other wavelengths, The Accident appeared much brighter, indicating that it was a younger brown dwarf. 

Not ones to let such a contradiction go unchallenged, astronomers tracked down the object using an infrared telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii as well as the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. What they found was even stranger, published in a June study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Located about 50 light-years away from us, The Accident is careening through the galaxy at roughly 500,000 mph (about 800,000 km/h). This is much faster than other brown dwarfs that have been discovered to date, and indicates that The Accident is indeed old. Its incredible speed is likely the accumulated effects of larger gravitational bodies like actual stars slinging it around the Milky Way.

There is also the matter of its composition: it has a very low level of methane, a common compound found in brown dwarfs. The study authors believe that this is a result of the advanced age of the brown dwarf. Having formed when the universe was young and the massive stellar explosions known as supernova had not had time to distribute sufficient carbon atoms into the universe for the brown dwarfs hydrogen to bond with.

"It's not a surprise to find a brown dwarf this old, but it is a surprise to find one in our backyard," said study co-author Federico Marocco, an astrophysicist at Caltech, in a statement. "We expected that brown dwarfs this old exist, but we also expected them to be incredibly rare. The chance of finding one so close to the solar system could be a lucky coincidence, or it tells us that they're more common than we thought."

"This discovery is telling us that there’s more variety in brown dwarf compositions than we’ve seen so far,” said Davy Kirkpatrick, an astrophysicist at the Infrared Processing & Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California and a co-author of the study. “There are likely more weird ones out there, and we need to think about how to look for them."

Analysis: Science isn't just for the professional scientists

Its easy to fall into thinking that science is something that professional scientists do, but for much of scientific history, science was progressed by people with more mundane day jobs. 

In fact, it really wasn't until the Industrial and Modern eras that scientists became a "profession" that you could pursue as a career. It's also something that anyone can contribute to if they have the passion for it and you are willing and able to follow a scientifically rigorous approach. The Accident is one such contribution and the are countless others like it made by people working late at night on a passion project.

So if you love science but always felt like you were consigned to just reading about it, there's never been a better time than now to jump in. You might even get to name a new discovery something completely off-the-wall and have it go down in history.

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Are you ready to capture a rare ‘Blue Moon’ with two giant planets, then your own home galaxy? 

Both astrophotography and night-scape photography have boomed in recent years as camera sensors have gotten more sensitive and better at producing noise-free long exposure images using high ISOs. The pandemic has also caused a spike in interest in the night sky, with sales of telescopes skyrocketing.  

There’s something interesting to photograph in the sky every night, but the weekend of August 21-22, in particular, will have photographers out in force if skies are clear. The following week or so just happens to be the start of one of the best 10-night periods to capture our Milky Way galaxy arcing across the sky, too.

Here’s everything you need to know about when and how to photograph a ‘Blue Moon’ on its own, alongside Saturn and Jupiter, as well as the Milky Way in the coming nights and weeks.

1. A ‘Blue Moon’ rising 

When: Dusk on Saturday August 21 and Sunday August 22, 2021

Where to look: Southeast at dusk, southwest at dawn

At precisely 12:02 UTC on Sunday August 22 (that's 8:02am EDT / 1:02pm BST / 10.02pm AEST), the Moon will be totally lit by the Sun. There’s a full Moon every 29 days, but that means, occasionally, there are four in the same season. That happens this summer, with the third (after June’s ‘Strawberry Moon’ and July’s ‘Buck Moon’) traditionally called a ‘Blue Moon.’ 

So, it won’t actually be blue? No! That would require a large volcano to have recently exploded and the atmosphere to be filled with fine ash – as in 1883 – but if you catch it at precisely the right time, it will instead be a beautiful muted orange. 

That time is, of course, the moment of moonrise, and this month there are two chances to catch it; dusk on Saturday August 21 and again on Sunday August 22. Check for the exact moonrise times for your location, but count on it being just after sunset on Saturday and about half an hour after sunset on Sunday.  

Get into position before time and set-up a tripod and camera in manual mode wearing a 70-300mm telephoto lens. That way, you’ll get the full Moon rising into shot behind, above or between trees, buildings or rooftops. Lookout for orangey moonlight becoming visible on the horizon just before it appears, or use the PhotoPills app’s AR mode overlay to see exactly where it will rise in your environment. 

Use ISO 200, an f/5.6 aperture and 1/250 sec shutter speed as a starting point. Manually focus, take some test shots, then tweak the aperture and shutter speed so get the correct exposure. The next ‘Blue Moon’ isn’t until 19 August, 2024, but this weekend also has a nice bonus... 

2. A ‘Blue Moon’ alongside two giant planets 

When: Friday, 20 August and Saturday, 21 August

Where to look: southeast, just above the ‘Blue Moon’ . 

Look to the southeast after dark anytime this month and you’ll see both Saturn and Jupiter shining brightly. Both planets are at ‘opposition’ in August, which is when Earth is between them and the Sun. 

That’s exactly the same situation as a full Moon, except it only happens once per year for planets. When a planet is close to opposition it rises at dusk and sets at dawn, is bigger and brighter than at any other time of the year, and its disk is fully-lit. 

At dusk on Friday August 20 the almost-full ‘Blue Moon’ will be visible just four degrees below Saturn. Arguably the more arresting – and more easily photographed – event happens the following night when the ‘Blue Moon’ will have moved to be just four degrees to the lower-right of Jupiter. That’s because Jupiter is about 10 times brighter than Saturn. 

The best shots, though, will be taken on Saturday, 21 August; zoom out slightly and you’ll be able to get a bright Jupiter alongside the ‘Blue Moon’, though you may have to wait until the Moon has risen slightly above the horizon before the planet becomes easily visible. 

3. This year’s best ‘Milky Way window’ 

When: 90 minutes after sunset

Where to look: South

While the Moon is bright enough to be photographed from anywhere on Earth, that’s not true of the collective light from the 400 billion other stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Its bright centre is only easily visible from May through October, and most easily photographed during August and September when it’s conveniently positioned straight after dark. 

So, it's ‘galaxy season’ right now! Imaging our galaxy’s arc across the night sky isn’t technically difficult, but you will need to be under a dark sky away from light pollution – and that includes the full Moon. 

Wait until Tuesday August 31 and you’ll have dark, moon-less night skies until midnight; the Moon will rise slightly later each night to make the following week even better. 

How to photograph the Milky Way

With a DSLR or mirrorless camera on a tripod, use as wide an angle a lens as you have (14mm or 16mm is ideal) and set your camera to record raw images. Manually focus your lens by pointing the dial to infinity (∞) and point it towards the south. 

As a rule of thumb, you want to use a high ISO (ISO 800 for crop-sensor cameras, ISO 3200 or higher for full-frame), open the aperture as much as possible (say, f/2.8 or as low as it goes on your lens) and use a shutter speed of about 20-25 seconds. A shutter-release cable is also really helpful to reduce shake and blur. 

Don’t be surprised if you see virtually nothing on images previewed on your camera’s LCD screen, because the magic comes in post-processing when you tweak parameters like contrast, exposure, clarity and luminance to make the galactic centre suddenly pop in brightness and color. 

However, you can check your camera is at least picking-up the Milky Way while you’re outside by ramping-up the ISO to some horrendously-high number and taking a test shot (but remember to take it back down afterwards). 

• These are the best photo editing apps you can download right now

Scientists have captured an unambiguous image of a moon-forming disc around an exoplanet, the first time such a thing has been imaged outside of our own solar system.

Using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers honed in on a still-forming solar system 400 light years away after earlier observations of the system determined that a pair of gas giants in the system – similar to our system's Jupiter-Saturn pairing – were still in the process of formation. 

The new image taken with ALMA is the clearest yet of the system's circumstellar accretion disc and was sharp enough to detect the circumplanetary disc around PDS 70c – so sharp in fact that astronomers are able to determine its diameter and mass.

“Our work presents a clear detection of a disc in which satellites could be forming,” said Myriam Benisty, a researcher at the University of Grenoble, France, and at the University of Chile, who led the research published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“Our ALMA observations were obtained at such exquisite resolution that we could clearly identify that the disc is associated with the planet and we are able to constrain its size for the first time.”

Despite the comparison to Jupiter and Saturn, the size of the moon-forming disc around PDS 70c is enormous, with a diameter comparable to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or about 500 times larger than the rings of Saturn. The mass of the accretion disc is enough to create as many as three satellites the size of the Moon.

• Exploring the weird world of exoplanets
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Analysis: getting to watch moons form in real time is a big deal

What makes this discovery so important for astronomers is that despite identifying more than 4,000 exoplanets in just the past decade and a half, these have all been found in mature systems where planet formation was essentially finished and any smaller ring systems like those around Saturn would be all but impossible to detect using current technology.

This means that everything we know – or think we know, to be more accurate – about moon formation has largely been based on what we've seen in our own solar system or through modeling, and both of these have a built-in bias.

When all you've seen is your own planetary neighborhood, it's easy to project that into the universe at large. For decades, it was assumed that gas giants existed on the outer edge of solar systems with the interior regions being the home of small, rocky planets.

This isn't what scientists found when they started looking at exoplanets for the first time, however. Instead, they found that so-called hot Jupiters – large gas giants comparable in size or larger than our Jupiter – are often found shockingly close to their host star with orbital periods measuring in mere days.

Something very similar could be the case with moon formation, where direct observation can upend a lot or even most of our assumptions about how natural satellites end up orbiting their host planets.

What's more, this discovery could also shed light on planetary formation as well. "These new observations are also extremely important to prove theories of planet formation that could not be tested until now," Jaehan Bae, a researcher with the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science, USA, and study co-author, said.

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While Huawei and Samsung have been dominating telephoto photography in phones with periscope lenses capable of 3x and even 5x optical zoom, Apple might not be far behind: iPhones may get their own periscope lenses... though not until 2022.

In other words, don’t expect the iPhone 12 to pack a periscope zoom – the telephoto system that stacks lenses along a phone’s length and uses a mirror to angle it out the back side. But the next iPhone will get a photography upgrade in the form of autofocus improvements, according to a Kuo report seen by 9to5Mac.

Apple is contracting with more lens suppliers to diversify its supply chain, Kuo claims: the iPhone 12’s autofocus will use a new  ball-based voice coil motor by the Korean lens supplier Semco, which will also provide periscope lenses for iPhones coming in 2022. The company will contribute 6P (or ‘six-element’) and 7P or 5P/6- lens arrays to Apple devices in 2021, according to AppleInsider.

The Chinese lens supplier Sunny Optical is also joining the supply chain to provide parts for next year’s iPhones, according to Kuo’s report, and expects them to supply 5P lenses for iPads and particular Mac lenses, too.

• Best camera phones: currently dominated by periscope lens-packing handsets
• It likely won't have a periscope lens, but we expect the Google Pixel 5 to top the list anyway
• Could we see a foldable iPhone Flip before a periscope zoom lens-packing iPhone?

Apple’s late to the periscope game, but does it matter?

Apple’s never been rushed to be the first with new technology, and the same will be true as more flagship phones adopt periscope telephoto lenses. The 2019 Huawei P30 Pro was the first mainstream phone to feature one, which managed a still-impressive 5x optical zoom.

Its successor, the 2020 Huawei P40 Pro, has one – but its even more lux sibling, the Huawei P40 Pro Plus, packs a periscope lens capable of 10x optical zoom. Not to be outdone, the 2020 Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra has a 5x optical periscope zoom lens, and the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Plus is rumored to get one, too. 

By 2022, the periscope lens may have dripped down to cheaper phones, as has been the case with other smartphone innovations. But it’s not like the features Apple has taken its time to adopt, from ultra-wide lenses (which first appeared on the iPhone 11 line) to wireless charging to eSIMs, have been poorly-received: iOS users are just happy to get what Android users have been enjoying for years. 

Via SkyNews

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Think astrophotography is for experts who stay out all night in deserts and national parks with expensive lenses? Although you do need a DSLR or a compact camera with manual settings – a smartphone just won't do – it's possible to take images of the International Space Station (ISS) and stars, and even create hypnotic concentric circles of star-trails using a basic lens and some simple techniques.

In this guide we'll show you the equipment, software and knowledge you need to take spectacular photos of celestial bodies – including man-made ones – in the night sky.

Taking images of the night sky requires three things: a DSLR (or compact camera with manual exposure), a tripod, and dark, clear skies. You might think the latter is hard to find, but even in the most light polluted cities it's possible to photograph stars – and the super-bright ISS is visible from everywhere. If you do want the blackest sky possible then get yourself into a rural area about 40km from a major town or city, or even better, an International Dark Sky Reserve or Park.

Whatever your location, since you're going to be opening the shutter for long periods, position the camera away from direct lights, such as streetlights or car lights. If you're in your back garden or yard, switch off all lights at the back of your house, and disable any motion-sensing lights. Using a shutter release cable, remote control or your camera's self-timer function will reduce blur.

Fancy photographing six astronauts in flight? It's easy to produce an ISS trail if you know how. Finding the ISS is the easy bit. First visit NASA's Spot The Station for imminent flybys at your location (which could be a few weeks away… or could be tonight). Since the ISS always appears in the west and crosses the sky to sink in the east – most visibly near sunset or sunrise – position your camera accordingly, using the compass on your smartphone if you don't know your cardinal points.

20 minutes before the flyby, and with your camera in manual mode and a wide-angle lens on infinity focus, take some test exposures for 30 seconds, using ISO 100 and with the aperture at f/2.8 or so (depending on the lens). When you see the ISS, open the shutter. When the shot is complete and you've captured an ISS trail, swivel the camera and do the same again as the ISS drops into the camera's field of view. An open landscape such as a park is great for this.

As Earth rotates, the stars appear to move, rising in the east and sinking in the west as the night progresses. It may seem a slow process, but take a 30-second exposure and zoom in on the viewfinder, and you'll see that the stars have actually blurred already.

What you don't want is moonlight bleaching out the night sky. To avoid that, check the phases of the Moon with an app like Luna Solaria. If you're under a Moon-less dark sky, you might even capture the Milky Way, too.

When it comes to photographing the Milky Way, it's all about keeping the shutter open long enough to allow the light to enter the camera, but not so long that the stars blur. Using the widest angle lens you have, set the aperture (f-stop) to as low (wide) as possible to let in the starlight.

With the manual focus on infinity, open the shutter for 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds and so on until you get something you're happy with. Zoom in on the LCD screen to see if it's sharp. If it's blurred, nudge the focus to just shy of infinity, and take another shot. If it's too light, shorten the exposure time and put the ISO on 100. If it's too dark, open the shutter for longer and increase the ISO. Adjust the white balance to Tungsten to help the stars look more natural, and even colourful.

The night sky in the Northern Hemisphere appears to revolve around a central point; Polaris, the North Star. Why? It sits directly above the North Pole, so the Earth's axis appears to point directly at it.

If you want to shoot a star-trail where the stars draw circles around Polaris, you need to find it. You can use a compass app or a planetarium app like Sky Safari to help, though you can quite easily find the Plough/Big Dipper in the night sky without tech.

Find the two stars at the far end of the bowl, and go from Merak at the bottom to Dubhe at the top of the bowl. Then continue this imaginary line on for about four times the distance. The lonely looking star you come to is Polaris, which is the point your star-trails will circle around. For those in the Southern Hemisphere, look for a point roughly between the Southern Cross and bright star Achernar.

Take test shots of the night sky until you're happy, then leave the camera exactly where it is. Take an exposure every 30 seconds or so for an hour or more (the longer the better – two hours looks awesome).

Many cameras will do this automatically using a time-lapse mode, or similar. Free software – StarStaX for Mac and Startrails for Windows (both less fiddly than using Photoshop) – will then combine all your images together to create a star-trail (if you take a "dark frame" with the lens cap on, it will also remove dead pixel marks).

If you have a Canon DSLR camera with no timelapse mode, consider a cheap timelapse timer/remote like the Canon TC-80N3 or the very inexpensive Alpine Labs Michron, which can be programmed via a smartphone app.

Although images of the stars in the night sky or of a star-trail that shows the Earth's rotation are both impressive on their own, something in the foreground will make it even better.

Interesting houses, barns, rock formations or trees work well; experiment with illuminating your subject with a flashlight for a short period (if you're taking multiple exposures, you can always remove these frames if you're not happy with them).

You also don't have to point your camera at Polaris. Turn 180 degrees and photograph the night sky to the south and you'll capture the apparent movement of the stars above the Earth's equator. Over the course of a long exposure (or multiple exposures), the stars will form sensational semicircular trails.

Producing star-trails can quickly become an obsession – and a whole new (if time consuming!) way to approach landscape or travel photography.

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

WorldWide Telescope is an incredible program that puts the universe at your fingertips. It was created using images and information gathered by telescopes probes and satellites, which are combined to create an interactive view of the sky that you can explore from your desktop.

WorldWide Telescope was developed by Microsoft Research – a branch of the company dedicated to furthering state-of-the-art computing and solving real-world problems. Astronomers use WorldWide Telescope to see the universe in many different wavelengths (including visible light, infra-red and gamma radiation), and there’s access to much more data via the Astrophysics Data System. 

WorldWide Telescope already has more than a million active users, so let’s join them and turn our eyes to the heavens.

1. Get started online

WorldWide Telescope is available as an HTML5 web app and a downloadable Windows application. We’ll start with the web version at www.worldwidetelescope.org.

To use Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, scroll past the welcome video and click ‘Explore WWT on the web’. A message will appear asking whether you want to share your location. This is optional, but telling WWT where you are will let you explore the sky as you’d see it from outside your own front door.

2. Begin exploring

Read the notes explaining how to navigate, then click ‘Close’.  WorldWide Telescope will present you with an image of the sky with constellations highlighted. 

Try clicking and dragging to pan around. You’ll see the list of celestial objects at the bottom of the screen change as you move around. Select one to explore it in more detail. Here we’ve chosen Mercury. You can click and drag to spin the planet, and use your mouse wheel to zoom. The amount of detail visible is incredible.

3. Pick a star

Now let’s use Microsoft WorldWide Telescope to take a look at a constellation. Click ‘Constellations’ in the top left, then pick one from the menu. Here we’ve chosen Ursa Major.

Make sure ‘Sky’ is selected under ‘Look at’, then right-click one of the constellation’s stars to learn more about it. Click ‘View object’ and the display will zoom right in to show you the star up close. You can also see research papers on the star, look it up online, and more.

4. Go deeper

Use your mouse wheel to zoom out again. Now you can try exploring Microsoft WorldWide Telescope on your own. Pan around and find a patch of sky that you’d like to explore and zoom in.

Right-click when you see something interesting and zoom in for a closer look. Here we've found a spherical collection of stars called NCGC 6752. It’s visible from Earth, so we could use the right ascension and declination provided to find it with a real telescope.

5. See through time with cosmic dust

You can explore the sky using various surveys listed in Microsoft WorldWide Telescope's top menu. Zoom out again and try clicking ‘SDF dust map’.

Cosmic dust used to be an annoyance to astronomers because it obscured the objects they were trying to see, but with infrared astronomy it can give us a huge amount of information about the formation and lifecycles of stars and planets. See if you can find a nebula made by a dying star.

6. Take a tour

Thousands of astronomers have collaborated to make Microsoft WorldWide Telescope such an extraordinary tool, and several have put together virtual tours of celestial objects and events.

Select ‘Guided tours’ from the top menu, then choose a tour and click the ‘Play’ button.  You can pause the tour at any time, or right-click anything that looks interesting to take a closer look and learn more about it.

7. Get the Windows app

You can do even more with the WorldWide Telescope desktop application, which is free to download. We recommend enabling the option that checks for automatic updates each time you start the program.

8. No place like home

While you’re using Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, take a moment to visit Earth. Here you can choose from several views (the Earth at Night options are particularly impressive) from different years. You can zoom right in to find your house, then move all the way out and begin exploring different galaxies again.

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope an amazing tool that makes you feel very powerful, but also very, very small, and it will keep you clicking, zooming and reading for days.

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

A team of astronomers has identified a rare case of an asteroid spinning through space, breaking apart as it goes.

The initial discovery was a happy accident. Dr Ken Smith of the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast was hunting for exploding stars (supernovae) when he came across an object with a tail resembling a comet – but it didn't match any known records. Intrigued, he contacted his colleagues to investigate.

• Are we getting closer to finding 'Planet Nine'?
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Two months of study followed, and the results have now been published – including images from the Hubble Space Telescope that clearly show a trail of material that was ejected in short bursts in October and December 2018.

New telescopes, new discoveries

The asteroid, named Gault, is spinning twice every hour – so fast that rock and gas is being flung from its surface into space. The researchers believe that heat from the sun has gradually made it rotate faster, and its spins have been gradually accelerating for over 100 million years.

The two bursts of material late last year could have been caused by something as small as colliding with a pebble.

"This self-destruction event is rare," said Olivier Hainaut, from the European Southern Observatory, Germany.

"Active and unstable asteroids such as Gault are just now being detected because of new survey telescopes that scan the entire sky, which means asteroids that are misbehaving such as Gault cannot escape detection anymore." 

Via Queen's University Belfast

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

There are lots of free space exploration programs around, but Celestia is one of the best. Not only does it let you click your way around the Milky Way, with stunning travelling animations, it also lets you control time and see how objects behave and interact. Whether you want to track an eclipse across the surface of a planet, follow a telescope in orbit, or watch the trajectory of a comet, you’re in complete control.

All planets and stars in Celestia are rendered in full 3D, and you can zoom and rotate them with seamless animations. It’s truly stunning, and completely free. Here’s how to start exploring.

1. Learn to navigate

Download Celestia and run the installer. Once it’s finished, launch Celestia for the first time and tap [Alt]+[Enter] to access full-screen mode.

Navigating in Celestia is a little different to other programs you might be used to. Holding the left mouse button and dragging will move the window horizontally and vertically. Holding both mouse buttons and moving left and right will rotate the selected object, and moving up or down will zoom in or out. Holding the right mouse button and dragging will rotate your view of the object.

2. Travel through time

Looking at the Earth, you’ll notice that its position relative to the sun and moon is an accurate representation of the current date and time (displayed at the top right).

You can speed up time by tapping [L], slow it down by tapping [K], freeze it using [Space], or set a custom time using the ‘Time’ option in the main menu. There will be a total solar eclipse on 2 July this year – try setting this date to see what happens (tapping [Ctr]+[E] turns on eclipse shadows).

3. Go beyond Earth

The number keys 1-9 on your keyboard let you visit other planets in the solar system. Tap [6] to select Saturn, then press [G] to travel there (the animation is superb). Tapping [C] will centre the selected object in your field of view. You can return to our sun (Sol) at any time by pressing [H] for ‘home’. 

You aren’t limited to the Sol system – click a star or other celestial body and its name will be displayed in the top left. Tap [G] to visit it. Once you’re there, right-click the object and select ‘Info’ to see an encyclopedia entry from The Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center. For more information, try searching for its Wikipedia entry.

4. Travel somewhere specific

If you’d like to visit a specific location in Celestia, click ‘Navigation > Select Object’, then type its name and click ‘OK’. Here we've selected Proxima – the closest star to Sol.

Clicking ‘Navigation > Star Browser’ is another way to visit a particular star, and you can choose to see just those with planets, the nearest, or the brightest. You can use the 1-9 keys to toggle through the planets in any system.

5. See man-made objects

Tap [H] [G] [3] [G] to return to Earth. Click ‘Render > View options’ and take a look at the different orbit and label options. Try checking ‘Spacecraft’ and ‘Orbits’, then use your mouse to rotate the planet until you find the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope. You can see them moving in real time. 

You’ll also be able to see the orbits of planets around their stars when you make orbits visible.

6. Stargaze from a new perspective

Celestia is also a great tool for learning about constellations. Click ‘Render > View options’ again and check ‘Diagrams’ and ‘Labels’ under the Constellations heading. The names are in Latin by default; uncheck the appropriate box to see them in English. You can see the constellations from anywhere in the solar system by travelling to different planets, and visit their stars by clicking them.

Fancy a different perspective? Zoom out as far as you can (your mouse wheel is the easiest way to do this), and eventually you’ll reach the edge of the Milky Way. Once there, you can pan around and rotate it like anything else. You can also select other galaxies, and there are many more galaxy models available to download from The Celestia Motherlode.

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

As the brightest and largest object in the night sky, the moon is a great subject to use as an introduction to astrophotography.

The moon is so large that you can easily shoot it with a normal telephoto lens, and it’s also bright enough that you can use a shutter speed fast enough to avoid having to use a tracking mount.

But even though the moon is relatively easy to photograph in the night sky, you still need to use the right techniques and careful planning to get a good shot. 

Knowing how to photograph the moon starts with getting yourself a long zoom lens to ensure you get close enough to capture detail. A 70-300mm telephoto zoom is a great starting point, but if you really want fill the frame with the moon, you might want to look into getting a super telephoto zoom. 

Don't worry if you haven't got a DSLR or mirrorless camera though, as a variety of bridge cameras also offer huge zoom lenses. 

A tripod is also a must to avoid camera shake when taking moon pictures. Also check the weather forecast in advance, as it goes without saying, to photograph the moon you'll need a clear and cloudless sky.

Pollution in big cities can sometimes get in the way of a crisp clear shot, so consider driving out to somewhere where the air will be cleaner to photograph the moon.

Look online for charts that show moonrise times, and if you can, wait until as late at night as possible, so the sky will be completely dark and the moon will be bright and clear against a black backdrop.

We hauled our equipment into the back garden half an hour before midnight to get everything set up for our shot at the top of the page.

When you're ready to go, make sure your camera is set up so you'll be shooting in raw format. This will give you the picture quality you need in order to be able to crop your final image to get closer to the moon, as well as edit the exposure, contrast and clarity to bring out the detail on the moon's surface more clearly.

As well as being beautiful in itself, a big, bright moon shot can be useful. Once you've followed our steps and come away with a clear image, we'll walk you through how to add your lunar masterpiece to night landscapes in Photoshop.

While it's a big challenge to shoot a well-exposed nightscape that also includes a well-defined moon, it's a cinch to add the moon in Photoshop, and we'll walk you through how to create a dramatic composite in five easy steps.

Step-by-step: How to photograph the moon

Make the moon bigger

When you’re deciding when to shoot the moon, it’s also worth remembering that it isn’t always the same distance from the earth. Its orbit is elliptical, so this distance varies at different times. When there’s a full moon that’s closer than around 220,000 miles (360,000km) from the earth, this is known as a super moon. The difference in size and brightness between a super and a micro moon isn’t huge, but even a small change can make a difference to your shots. For detailed information about the moon, try the Moonrise and Moonset calculator. 

You’ll need to fill in your location, which will then allow you to discover all sorts of useful information, such as moonrise and moonset times. On this site you can also find out about a much rarer event, the lunar eclipse. This can be a stunning sight, because during a full lunar eclipse the moon can be transformed into a glowing red color. During this event, the moon is much less bright than when it’s illuminated by the sun, so you’ll need to use a higher ISO or wider aperture. But the results can be stunning.

Watch out for condensation

As the temperature drops during the night, you’ll often find that any moisture in the air will condense on any gear you have out in the open. 

On your tripod, bag or even the outside of the camera, this can be unpleasant, but not disastrous. It’s when it forms on the lens, viewfinder and rear screen that it becomes a real problem. 

You can minimize the probability of condensation by giving your gear some time to gradually acclimatize, rather than taking it straight out of a warm car or house into the cold air, but on many evenings you’ll still find condensation will form, so take along plenty of cloths and cleaning kit. 

How to add the moon to other night scenes

You can use a simple Photoshop technique and add your moon pictures to liven up the dark skies of other images.

1. Get started

Launch Photoshop. Open your moon shot and the image you want to work with - you need a photo that includes a big expanse of dark sky.

2. Cut out the moon

Select your moon shot and use the Lasso tool to trace around the moon's contours. Press Ctrl+C to copy the cutout moon.

3. Paste it in

Open your landscape photo and hit Ctrl+V to paste the moon onto it. Use the Move tool to position the moon where you like in the sky.

4. Lighten up

In the Layers palette, click 'Normal' and select 'Lighten' from the dropdown. This will cut out any remaining black sky from your moon image.

5. Flatten to finish

When you're happy with your composite image, click 'Layer' in the main menu and pick 'Flatten' from the dropdown to create a single photo.

Welcome to TechRadar's Space Week – a celebration of space exploration, throughout our solar system and beyond. Visit our Space Week hub to stay up to date with all the latest news and features.

While you're out and about this weekend, see if you can get some snaps of cloud formations with your smartphone – Nasa needs your help in logging the various cloud cover formations and weather patterns as clouds of different types pass overhead.

The appeal for extra data is part of the GLOBE (or Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) program, and additional pictures will help Nasa identify the types of cloud cover it's seeing in its satellite imagery. You don't need any previous weather spotting experience to take part, and you can submit up to 10 pictures a day.

"The GLOBE Program is offering this challenge to show people how important it is to Nasa to have citizen scientist observations; observations from the ground up," says Nasa's Marilé Colón Robles. "We’re going from winter to spring, so the types of storms will change, which will also change the types of clouds."

Weather spotting

Unless you're an experienced data entry enthusiast, you're going to need the GLOBE app for Android and iOS – this guides you through the process of snapping cloud formations for scientific research, which is basically as simple as pointing your camera at the sky.

Cloud pictures can be posted between March 15 and April 15, and the citizen scientist who logs the most imagery is going to be highlighted in a video posted on the project website and social media – so that's another reason to put your smartphone camera to good use over the next month or so.

The pictures collected by users on the ground can be vital in identifying different types of clouds as they pass overhead, and tracking weather and climate systems, according to Nasa. "Just go outside," is the advice from Colón Robles if you're not sure your data is going to be useful.

• Nasa is busy training its astronauts using mixed reality

Via Engadget

Main image: The Moon, photographed with an iPhone. Credit: Jamie Carter

We all know about the amazing quality of today’s smartphone cameras, but how often have you pointed one at the night sky? Smartphone astrophotography is not going to match those images from the Hubble Space Telescope, or from a DSLR camera attached to a telescope on an equatorial mount, which follows stars as they appear to move.

However, what you can capture with your phone – from close-ups of planets and the craters and mountain range of the Moon to timelapses and star-trails – will astound you. Get ready, Instagram, for some astronomically good phone images. 

Manual control apps

The sensitivity of the sensor in your smartphone's camera may be set, but how you control it is not. While the native camera app on your phone is pretty restrictive, there are a raft of apps that give you manual control of ISO, exposure, shutter speed, and even allow you to capture in raw rather than JPEG.

That's important because raw images contain a lot more data than a JPEG, which is heavily compressed, so can withstand post-processing in Photoshop or similar photo-editing software.  

The app of choice with smartphone astrophotographers is NightCap Camera for the iPhone, which has various preset modes, but also allows manual control of ISO, shutter speed, white balance, focus and digital noise reduction.

"Many astrophotographers will take multiple images and then 'stack' the images using a desktop computer, but NightCap Camera stacks images in the iPhone or iPad," says amateur astronomer Mike Weasner at Cassiopeia Observatory in Arizona , who was the first person to do astrophotography with an iPhone back in 2007.

"This stacking capability allows for imaging brighter deep sky objects, and it also lets NightCap Camera create star trail images in the device, or capture long exposures showing the motion of bright satellites like the International Space Station." 

How to photograph stars, satellites and the Northern Lights

Wide-field astrophotography is not typically a strength of smartphone cameras, but things are changing. As well as having more sensitive sensors, phones like the iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 and S8 have excellent exposure control.

However, you do need to use them with a manual control app, as well as put them on a tripod using a bracket – although at a pinch you can steady your phone by leaning it against something, even a rock.

"On their own, smartphones will often only pick up the very brightest stars and planets, and the photos aren't very spectacular," says astrophotography expert Andrew Symes. "But with a low-light app you can capture some nice images of constellations and the Milky Way along with objects in the foreground – I've also caught the Northern Lights this way."

Any app with manual control will allow you to capture satellites, the brightest and easiest of which is the International Space Station (ISS), for which NightCap Camera has a dedicated mode. Check SpotTheStation for the next flyover where you live.

"For the Milky Way, constellations, or Zodiacal Light use Long Exposure and Light Boost mode in NightCap Camera," says Weasner, advising experimenting with ISO, shutter speed and exposure. 

How to create a star-trail image

A good star-trail can be mesmerising, and the circular patterns you can produce will give a new perspective on the rhythms of the night sky. Although some will gaze at such photos with awe, producing an image that shows the exact movement of the night sky over an hour or so is a relatively simple technique. The beauty of NightCap Camera is that's it has a built-in Star Trails mode, so you don't have to do much apart from orientation and timing. 

To maximize the number of stars in the final image, wait for a night with no moon (the week before new Moon is good), choose somewhere dark and away from artificial light, put your fully-charged phone on a tripod. Point it north if you want the classic circles (if you go south, you'll get curves). Take the brightness right down, and press go. Wait for an hour; NightCap Camera will automatically produce a star-trail. 

How to get a close-up of the Moon

For this one you'll need any telescope, and ideally a smartphone adaptor like the Orion Steadypix Universal or Levenhuk. An adaptor is optional; it is possible to take a thoroughly decent photo of the Moon just by holding it up to the eyepiece of a telescope. However, it is a bit tricky to align it consistently, and an adaptor makes it much, much easier.

"Make sure that your focus is perfect," says Symes, who uses a Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope. "I often use the digital zoom on my phone to zoom in on a prominent crater or feature and check the focus, make sure it's in perfect focus, and then zoom back out because you don't want to use much digital zoom in your telescopic photos." 

Crop the images later, and if you want to get closer, use a higher-powered eyepiece. If you're using a refractor or Cassegrain telescope, you'll also need to flip the final image. 

You also don't want to overexpose the many very bright white areas on the Moon. "Use the phone camera's exposure adjustment tool to dim the moon to the point where the brightest areas are properly exposed." Advises Symes. "I find that with the latest iPhone models it helps to adjust the brightness while zoomed in on the moon using digital zoom. I zoom in so that the moon fills more than the entire view, set and hold the brightness, and then zoom out." 

The advantage of the Orion Steadypix Universal is that it attaches to both an eyepiece or a tripod, so you can use it for wide-field astrophotography as well as close-ups. You can also make your own. 

How to get a close-up of a planet

Getting an image of the Moon through a static telescope is possible, but how quickly our satellite appears to move (thanks to Earth's rotation) will shock you; it just won't stay still. Ditto the planets.

“iPhones have such good brightness controls that I can brighten and dim the planets using just the phone's built-in tools," says Symes, though he advises that for some Android phones a polarizing moon filter might be needed to dim the moon and bright planets enough to expose them properly. 

So if a computerised telescope, which tracks objects as the Earth rotates, is handy for photos of the bright moon, it's essential for the much dimmer planets. "It allows you to keep the object centered," explains Symes. "It can often be difficult and time consuming to initially get your object in the frame of the phone camera, so once it's there it really helps if you don't have to keep adjusting your telescope to reposition the object." 

As well as encouraging smartphone astrophotographers to experiment with fisheye and wide angle clip-on lenses for constellations and star-trails, Weasner has some ingenious advice to keep the phone steady: use the volume buttons on a pair of earbuds as a remote shutter release.

A tripod – even a table top one – will also make your life a lot easier. “They will get you started with star-trails, constellations, satellites, planet configurations, and more," says Weasner.

If you want to photograph the Moon, phases of Venus, moons of Jupiter, Saturn's ring, and brighter deep sky objects, you'll still need a telescope, but smartphones are at last becoming a cost-effective way to experiment with astro-photography. 

• The jet age is over – here comes supersonic, hyper-mach travel

Earth 2.0 is out there – and telescope technology is going to find it. From a trickle to a torrent in the last decade, space telescopes keep on finding new and tantalising evidence of Earth-sized planets in our Milky Way galaxy. 

In early September 2017, researchers using data from the Hubble Space Telescope calculated that there could be water on the surface of the seven planets around TRAPPIST-1, a dwarf star the size of Jupiter discovered earlier this year. 

Found in the direction of the Aquarius constellation, TRAPPIST-1 is 40 light-years from Earth, which in relative terms puts it in our neighbourhood. How do astronomers know that water is there? And will space telescopes shed any more light on 'other Earths'? 

Exoplanets in transit

All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planets were detected using the transit method; when an exoplanet passes across a star as seen from a telescope, that star dims slightly. The light signature recorded by the telescope can then be used to calculate the mass and radius of the planet. This is the science of spectroscopy, with powerful space telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer, and Kepler able to observe exoplanets across broad wavelengths, ranging from ultraviolet (UV) to infrared (IR) light.

For this latest TRAPPIST-1 discovery, it's been all about detecting UV rays, which (above a certain level) can break-up water molecules. The researchers found that while the inner planets have probably lost all their water due to high UV levels, the outer planets (called e, f and g) have less UV, and are all in the habitable zone, so may contain rivers and oceans. 

X-ray specs

"It is exciting that we can now study the environments of individual Earth-sized planets," said Professor Peter Wheatley from the University of Warwick’s Astronomy & Astrophysics Group in the Department of Physics. 

"Our results suggest that water, and potentially life, could have survived in the TRAPPIST-1 system, despite the relatively intense UV and X-ray irradiation of the planets." 

However, despite the success of the Hubble Space Telescope and the other space telescopes, a lot of ground-based telescopes were also used to corroborate the data (Belgium's Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) telescope in Chile, in particular). 

Besides, the conclusion that there could be water on some of TRAPPIST-1's exoplanets is based on a lot of assumptions. What astronomers need in order to probe exoplanets effectively is a much more powerful space telescope. Luckily, there's one due to launch next year. 

The 'new Hubble'? 

After 27 years of service, Hubble is about lose its spot as the human race's most powerful eye on the cosmos. 

Due for launch in October 2018 from the ESA's launch pad in French Guiana, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is twice as large as Hubble. Instead of orbiting Earth, it will orbit the Sun, 930,000 miles from Earth, at the L2 point to get our clearest-ever view of distant galaxies. 

It will do that by using a staggering 22-metre sunshield and gold-plated beryllium mirrors stretching 6.5 metres – three times larger than Hubble's – to detect IR light from the furthest depths of the known Universe in an effort to understand the Big Bang. 

It will also measure IR to detect what makes-up the atmospheres of exoplanets around distant stars. Its multiple cameras are also much more powerful than Hubble's, though it's too far away to be serviced by astronauts, (Hubble was famously fixed by a Space Shuttle visit in 1993). 

If all goes to plan, the JWST will change astronomy forever, with the TRAPPIST-1 planets first in line for a close look, but there are plans for many successors. 

Though little-known, the WFIRST proposed for launch in 2025 will mostly study dark energy and dark matter, but also be capable of carefully studying the atmospheres of exoplanets by blocking its view of stars nearby.

Super space 'scope of the future

Space telescopes are usually rated on the size of their mirror; Hubble has a 2.4-metre mirror, and JWST a 6.5-metre. So why not dream bigger and plan for a whopping 16-metre space telescope capable or confirming not whether life on exoplanets is possible, but whether it actually exists or not? 

That's exactly what astronomers are doing, with plans afoot for the Large UV/Optical/IR Surveyor (LUVOIR). Designed to occupy the same Sun orbit as the JWST, LUVOIR's 16-metre mirror would be a massive leap forward. 

The LUVOIR is not confirmed yet, and even when it is that will merely kick-start a 15-20 year countdown to its launch, but the momentum behind some kind of extra-large space telescope to succeed the JWST already exists. A 12-metre High-Definition Space Telescope (HDST) is proposed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA). Its aim? To find Earth 2.0 – optically. 

Space telescopes of this massive size are what Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket was born to launch. 

Back on Planet Earth

Ground-based telescopes are often hamstrung by clouds and distorting hot air, and they're also rendered part-time by nature of being on a rotating planet, but they have a critical role to play in discovering Earth 2.0. Usually they're used to corroborate findings of space telescopes, but don't underestimate them. Not only are the mirrors even more massive, but several exoplanets have been discovered using them. 

So the race is on to build ever-larger ground-based 'scopes. The Giant Magellan Telescope's (GMT) 24.5-metre mirror will probe exoplanets from Chile's Las Campanas Observatory, while to the north at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory the 39-metre mirror European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is underway and due to be completed by 2024. 

The E-ELT will be the 'world's biggest eye on the sky', though not far behind will be the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. 

The latter will use a mirror of 'only' 8.4-metres, but its whopping 3,200 megapixel wide-angle camera (that's over three billion pixels of solid state detectors) will record 15 terabytes of data every night as it catalogues 10 billion stars, their type and distance from the galactic plane. 

The search for Earth 2.0 will take time, telescopes and many terabytes, but it's already an unstoppable mission; it now seems certain that tech will find our twin.

• Want some help dreaming of what lies beyond the stars? Check out our list of the best sci-fi movies 

Could the Moon be about to break the internet? On August 21 this year our satellite’s slightly tilted orbit just happens to coincide exactly with the Sun to cause that rarest of natural events: a Total Solar Eclipse. 

For two minutes observers along a narrow path from Oregon to South Carolina in the USA will be able look skyward and see, for only two minutes or so, the rare splendour of totality; an awesome sight of the solar corona displayed as a vast, ice-white halo around the New Moon. 

Cue millions of spectators, many of whom will take photos and videos on phones, tablets, DSLRs, action cams and 360 cams, and immediately upload them. Hotels are largely sold out, but there are lots of eclipse campsites and RV parks. 

Since totality sweeps across the USA in 90 minutes, there is likely to be long surge in uploads to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. So should you join in and attempt to take photos and video of nature's greatest spectacle? 

Zoom-lens & tracking mounts

This is something for professional photographers with expensive gear. If you really want to take your own close-up of the solar corona, it’s to Mr Eclipse you should head. There you’ll find advice for beginners from Fred Espenak, the ex-Nasa astrophysicist and eclipse expert who has seen 27 Total Solar Eclipses. 

He’s planning on taking twenty cameras to Caspar, Wyoming for the August 21 event. Before you go down a similar path, consider that the eclipse is a moving target. The ‘classic’ close-up of an eclipsed Sun is possible using a zoom lens – about 500mm or 600mm is about right – but that’s not all you’ll need. 

“The eclipse drifts through your frame very rapidly, and you’re going to have to reposition it during totality, so it’s very difficult to shoot without an astronomical tracking mount that will keep it in the center of your frame automatically,” says David Makepeace at Eclipse Guy, and a veteran of 22 eclipses. “It’s just too much work – forget it!” Free post-eclipse download from Nasa, anyone? 

Wide-angle with a DSLR

The eclipse is an all-sky event; the Moon's shadow rolls over you, creating a V-shape in the sky if you have a big horizon. So there’s a lot you can capture with the wide-angle lens on a phone or action cam – including yourself. 

“I don't try to compete with the people with expensive setups,” says Michael Zeiler, an eclipse-chaser and expert eclipse cartographer at GreatAmericanEclipse.com, who concentrates on getting a wide-angle view of the eclipse using a DSLR. 

“Practice with your camera first and have your camera set-up so when you press the trigger it will do a bracketed series of images,” he advises. Most DSLRs from Nikon or Canon have this capability. “Once you've captured a nice bracketed series you can do some work in Photoshop to process a HDR image.” 

If you stay reasonably wide-angle, you don’t have to reposition the camera during totality. “You don’t want to be attending to your camera during those two minutes – you will regret it,” says Makepeace. 

Another option is to shoot a video in either Full HD or 4K and extract still images later. Although the resulting image won’t be massively high resolution, it means you can roll the camera a few minutes before totality, and leave it alone while you watch the spectacle with your naked eye (though only totality – the partial eclipse MUST be viewed with solar eclipse glasses). 

“It’s OK for a souvenir shot for Instagram where even a 1920x1080 image is fine, but it will look soft compared to a lot of the eclipse photos you’ll see,” says Makepeace. 

Smartphones & GoPros

Most people will use a smartphone, and while you’re not going to get much of a close-up of totality itself, the results can be impressive. “If you are going to shoot it, bang off a couple of shots with a phone or a simple point and shoot camera during totality,” says Makepeace, whose dramatic short film Still Hooked was created using several GoPros to get different angles. 

“Smartphones do a pretty good wide-angle job of seeing the eclipse in the sky,” he adds. Just turn be sure to switch off the flash. 

Another possibility is to record a short video not only of the eclipse, but of you and your group watching it. “Put your smartphone on a tripod, a chair, a vehicle, a rock or a table, and shoot a video from about two minutes before totality,” says Zeiler. 

“Frame the video so that your observing group is in the foreground, and the eclipse is in the background – you’ll capture an amazing evolution in the appearance of the sky, but even better, you’ll capture the reaction of the people that you're with. That will be a precious keepsake from the eclipse.” 

360 cameras

Since it’s an all-sky event, a 360 camera makes a lot of sense for the same reasons as a phone. Such cameras were around for last year’s eclipse, which captured some fascinating 360-degree 4K video footage.

”It’s an interesting approach because the eclipse is a 360 degree experience, and I saw a couple from Indonesia that were pretty cool,” says Makepeace. “You should shoot a bunch of stuff beforehand so you know what you’re doing on the day of the eclipse.” 

Should you photograph the eclipse? 

Opinion is divided. Some dedicated eclipse-chasers are insane about photography, while some completely avoid them. “If you’ve never done astrophotography before, don’t spend totality fiddling with equipment because you’ll miss the experience,” says Eddie Mahoney, the only Nasa Ambassador, and Director of Astronomy and host of Tour of the Stars at the Hyatt Regency Maui. 

“Just get yourself a nice comfortable lawn chair, sit back, relax and just experience Totality – don’t let anything else distract you.” 

Every eclipse-chaser says the same thing: if it's your first experience of a Total Solar Eclipse, do not attempt to photograph it. Totality is too special and too short to waste fiddling with cameras, so … put your cameras and phones away!? As if … 

Best of both worlds

“I’m not sure I totally buy that theory,” says Eric Adams, a journalist and photographer whose image of totality from the Faroe Islands of the Total Solar Eclipse in March 2015 was flashed around the world by Associated Press. 

“You can do both.” Although Adams admits that he did indeed mostly miss his first experience of totality because he was attending to his cameras, he thinks there is a way to photograph the spectacle without it ruining the actual moment. 

“Shoot like crazy from -5s to +15s with a telephoto on a tripod, then stop and take a full 1 minute 30 seconds to soak it in and enjoy it,” he says. “Maybe burning off one or two frames midway if you feel like it, because you'll be bummed if you don't have something to save and share.” 

How to practice photographing the eclipse

That’s the crux of the matter; first-time eclipse-chasers probably shouldn’t photograph the eclipse, but they will anyway. So plan to practice well in advance of August 21. “If you shoot in twilight right after sunset you have a very similar sky to what you will have during totality, give or take,” advises Makepeace. 

That’s about 20 minutes after sunset; all you need is a clear sky. “It’s good for seeing how your camera behaves, and what your camera’s auto exposure and auto focus are actually doing – it’s a great rehearsal window for eclipses.” 

If you mess it up, no worries; there's only 680 days to wait until the next total solar eclipse in South America.   

Jamie Carter is the editor of WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com and author of the USA Eclipse 2017 Camping & RV Guide and the The Great South American Eclipse Travel Guide for July 2, 2019. 

• A guide to the Total Solar Eclipse on August 21
• The A to Z of night photography
• How to photograph the moon

When it comes to landscape photography, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have the best seats in the house; when you’re 250 miles up and your window is full of Planet Earth, it’s impossible to resist. With almost 200 days and 84 million miles over 3,600 orbits of the planet, first as Flight Engineer then as Commander of the ISS in 2014/2015, NASA astronaut Terry Virts found time to photograph everything from sunrises and ice fields to hurricanes and lightning storms. 

Tweeting from space

Virts was seriously prolific, and tweeted his images daily at @AstroTerry, though sending a tweet in space isn’t easy. 

“There's very slow internet that's only available when you have certain satellite coverage, so most of the time I emailed my pictures to a guy on the ground with a message, and he actually posted it," says Virts. 

"I was so busy up there I didn't want to spend all my spare time on the internet." 

Now he's back on terra firma, Virts has put together his favorite images in a book, View from Above: An Astronaut Looks at the World, which is on pre-order now and publishes in October.

The camera gear

Not surprisingly, NASA supplies the astronauts with some pretty nifty photography gear. 

"We had just about every professional camera," says Virts. 

"The Nikon D4 is up there, about 12-15 bodies, though each astronaut is assigned their own. We have them pre-positioned in the labs, by the labs window, and in the cupola in the US segment [...] We had all kinds of lenses, from 8mm super-wide angle fisheye lenses all the way up to a 800m lens with a 1.4 doubler on it, and every zoom lens and prime lens in between you can think of." The Russians also use Nikons, mainly the D3 and D800.

The video gear

During his expedition the crew was supplied with Canon EOS-1D C cameras by IMAX to film segments for the Jennifer Lawrence-narrated IMAX 3D film A Beautiful Planet that's currently showing in IMAX Theatres. 

"We got to use a couple of amazing Zeiss lenses, worth about US$50,000 each, they were really amazing pieces of glass," says Virts, who also got to use more Hollywood-quality cameras for the IMAX, notably a top-of-the-line Canon EOS C500 and even an ultra HD-capable RED Epic Dragon camera.

“After 195 days up there taking thousands of stills, during the last week I used the RED camera to shoot 1TB of Ultra HD footage," says Virts. So NASA put together a showreel of it – the first 4K video shot in space. Virts also took a GoPro Hero3 camera with him on a spacewalk. 

The observatory module

The main reason that astronauts have been able to take such mesmerising images from the ISS in recent years has less to do with camera gear than a new observatory module. The cupola has a 31-inch window and boasts 360 degree views. "I actually installed it," says Virts of his first trip to space in 2011 as a pilot on the space shuttle Endeavour mission STS-130. He went on to spend a lot of his time inside the cupola on his next trip to space. "The cupola is everyone's favourite place, but it does have a plastic coating to protect it from scratches, and while it works great for wide-angle photos, it kills any zoom-ins," says Virts. 

Timing it right

“Finally on my last day on the ISS, I got a pic of the Pyramid – it took me seven months to get it,” says Virts. “The way orbital mechanics work you get a day pass and night pass over a particular place every day, but some passes are close, and some could be 100km away,” says Virts. “And there’s a lot of work to do, plus sleep – so I quickly realised I would have to set an alarm if I wanted to take photos of specific places.”

"I used 200-300mm lenses from the cupola to take close-ups, but that was more Scott Kelly's thing – he used an 800mm lens from the lab window," explains Virts. Kelly – on his gruelling Year in Space mission – took many stunning close-ups of Earth. So did British astronaut Tim Peake, who arrived on the ISS in December 2015, and has since produced the wonderful book Hello, is this planet Earth? My View from the International Space Station. 

Getting creative

Although framing images of specific places on Earth was always tempting, as well a challenging, Virts preferred to take more artistic shots that place Earth in its actual context – a planet floating alone in space. 

"A lot of astronauts like to zoom in on their house, or on cities at night, but my favourite were the 24mm wide-angle shots, where you can see the curvature of Earth and the blackness of space," says Virts. 

"I did a lot of time-lapse sequences and turned them into movies using Picasa, including one of the U.K and the aurora in the distance. It’s so hard to say, but probably my favorite images were clouds at dusk when the colouring was sublime.” 

The final image

So what do you do on your last day on the ISS, when you know you’re never going to return to space, and never again see that view from above? You go for a big picture, that’s what. Virts went down to the Cupola, he took the scratch-pane off the window, put a 10mm fish-eye lens on his camera, and set it to F22 to capture a sunburst against the curvature of the planet. 

“I looked at the first picture in the viewfinder and thought it was the best picture I had ever taken, and that I would ever take, so I transferred it to my laptop, put on my space-suit, got in the Soyuz capsule, and came back to Earth.”

Virts promptly landed in Kazakhstan in a Soyuz TMA-15M capsule on 11 June, 2015, and he's since retired from NASA. Is it all bit of a come-down? Photographically speaking, for sure. 

"I had everything up there,” says Virts. “Now I just have an iPhone.” 

• The space events you can't miss in 2017

It's no longer just Nikon and Hasselblad that can boost that their cameras have gone into space – now Sony can too.

An Alpha A7S II full-frame mirrorless camera has become the first commercial camera to be mounted outside the International Space Station (ISS), and has captured some mesmerising 4K footage of Earth.

The video above shows the Japanese islands, while the video below captures the US East coast at night. The footage was captured using a Sony FE PZ 28-135mm f/4 G OSS power zoom lens.

• The 10 best mirrorless cameras you can buy 

The Alpha A7S II was selected as the camera for the exterior platform on the ISS's Japanese Experiment Module (known as KIBO) after a series of tests were carried out to see how it would cope with the harsh environment of space. Among the deciding factors were the camera's excellent high-ISO performance (it has an ISO ceiling of 409,600) and ability to shoot high-resolution 4K video.

After being couriered to the ISS by a Japanese cargo transporter in December, the A7S II was installed in February. At some 250 miles above the surface of the Earth, the ISS completes an orbit approximately once every 90 minutes.

• You will, of course, need a 4K display to view the videos in all their glory. You'll find some great options among our 8 best monitors and displays on the market, and in our pick of the 10 best 4K TVs of 2017

We may live in a global economy, but the internet of things (IoT) is not global – not even close. Only 2.7% of the world's land is urban, and even landmass only makes up 29.2% of the planet's total surface.

"Mainstream communication systems only cover a small fraction of the Earth," says Richard Traherne, Chief Commercial Officer, Cambridge Consultants, who says that mobile phone coverage extends over only 10% of the planet – and that's being generous.

"It will take many years before IoT technologies are rolled out to achieve the same level of coverage as mobile networks even," he adds. No wonder, then, that in a quest to create global services, IoT infrastructure is slowly being sent into orbit.

Why does the IoT need satellites?

"IoT by satellite is an important part of IoT – it's intrinsically wide-area, low-power, and globally available," says Traherne. Any IoT project that requires wide area mobility and coverage – such as logistics on land, sea and air, asset monitoring (including oil, gas, electricity and water pipelines) and environmental monitoring – are key areas for IoT by satellite.

Cue satellites from Iridium and Inmarsat, although both are completely different in terms of technology and use-cases.

"For a long time we've been about voice, data and email with only some machine-to-machine (M2M) use-cases, but it's been fairly unsophisticated," says Paul Gudonis, President, Inmarsat Enterprise, which has just paired-up with Actility to deliver the world’s first global IoT network. "But over the last 12 months we've seen an explosion in companies wanting to get as much access to data as they can to drive efficiency – and much of it sits outside terrestrial coverage." 

"Satellite links are used in cellular networks as backhaul technologies for remote areas or areas in which traditional backhaul technologies are unsuitable," says Traherne. Increasingly, satellite fleets are being integrated into the IoT as backhaul – the link between an LPWAN network and a backbone network – typically where cellular coverage is poor or non-existent.

What is Iridium?

The Iridium system is a network of multiple Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, 500 miles up in the sky, travelling at 17,000 miles per hour (you can watch one flash dramatically just after sunset if you keep an eye on this website). "LEO devices rely on the ever-moving network above them to provide coverage anywhere as long as they have a clear path to the sky," says Traherne. 

SpaceX recently launched the first 10 of 70 satellites for Iridium (and landed the Falcon 9 rocket back on a drone-ship), which will add to its existing fleet of 66 satellites to create a $3 billion (around £2.4 billion, AU$3.9 billion) constellation called Iridium NEXT that's being described by some as the biggest tech refresh in the world right now. Iridium is paying SpaceX upwards of $500 million (around £400 million, AU$650 million) for seven launches.

"Iridium NEXT will extend Iridium's existing capability to provide higher speeds that unlock new possibilities in asset tracking, fleet management and other intelligent data applications," Traherne says. It could also bring mobile broadband to phone users in very remote areas. "Each satellite covers an area on the globe that's about the size of North America, and each coverage area overlaps so that there are no gaps in the coverage." 

Put simply, Iridium covers the entire planet, so fills in the gaps left by mainstream cellular and LPWAN IoT networks.

Main image credit: Iridium

• Are we any closer to solving the IoT’s ‘format war’?

What is Inmarsat?

Similar global coverage is achieved by Inmarsat, but the hardware and service is very different. Inmarsat has 11 higher-power satellites in geostationary orbits exactly 22,236 miles above specific points on Earth. They have much higher capacity than Iridium hardware, but there is a bigger latency – the time it takes for data to travel between the satellite and the receiver – due to the much greater physical distances the data has to cover.

Does this matter to IoT applications? Only if projects need time-critical data links (most do not), but there are other considerations. "Devices on the ground must have higher transmit powers for the greater transmit distance, meaning a greater power requirement," says Traherne, who also explains that those devices on the ground must typically orientate their antennas towards GEO satellites.

"The Inmarsat network is in a fixed position, so once you've got a connection it doesn't change – you can forget about it," says Gudonis. "Whereas Iridium specialises in small-burst data, Inmarsat is more focused on high data so we're more suitable for sensor aggregation where there's a higher data requirement."

A global IoT network?

 Inmarsat recently revealed that it and LPWAN provider Actility have created the first global IoT network on the LoRaWAN specification to connect low-cost, battery-operated sensors over long distances – and in harsh environments like farms, on oil and gas platforms, and in mines.

"We resell each other's technology to provide connectivity in places like the Northern Territory in Australia for agriculture and mining projects," says Peter Hogewoning, Regional Sales Director APAC, Actility. The tech is now being used to track cattle around remote ranches, to monitor water levels in reservoirs, soil moisture on plantations in Malaysia, and to identify potential failure points on oil platforms to minimise downtime.

Global asset tracking is also a flourishing area. "With connectivity from Inmarsat we can even put a gateway on a container ship and follow it – and everything on board – around the world," Hogewoning notes. "Satellite is becoming really important for the IoT." 

Both Iridium and Inmarsat are often used as the backhaul element in IoT projects that track endangered wildlife as part of IoT projects, though details are scant – such projects are top secret to avoid revealing the locations of the animals to poachers.

Is satellite too expensive for the IoT?

It's more expensive than any other form of connectivity, so it’s mostly used for high-value assets and government projects. However, that's about to change dramatically. "What I think is going to be the biggest impact on the satellite industry is the general change in the economics," says Gudonis. "The days of a very high cost-per-megabyte and cost-per-minute are gone, and we need to look at new ways to drive our business."

The technological revolution in rocket launches is critical in all of this. “SpaceX is bringing down the cost of launching satellites because it can reuse some of the launches, so we'll soon see the cost of using satellite services reduce significantly,” he adds. “It's going to dramatically change."

What about cube-sats?

Although its network relies on 11 huge satellites which are 22,000 miles from Earth, Inmarsat is also looking at creating an IoT network that would orbit much closer to the planet. Though it hasn’t used SpaceX for any launches so far, Inmarsat is working with SpaceX on exploring a future of cube-sats. It's something SpaceX – and OneWeb – are looking into as regards 'space internet' for people, not things. But Inmarsat is thinking specifically about the IoT.

"Small, low-cost satellites in orbit could be used for IoT sensor aggregation points, rather than having devices on the ground," says Gudonis, who explains that the most expensive thing in an IoT deployment for LPWAN isn't the sensors, but the base station.

"If you could put only sensors out on the ground, and then aggregate their data in space, that would change the types of applications we could look at," he observes. "You could then track anything as it moves without the need for multiple expensive base stations on land, at sea or on a plane – what amazes me is the insane expanse of different applications we can look at for satellite and the IoT."

• But what if the internet of things simply 'fails'?

Astronomers got a new toy in 2013. It's a satellite called Gaia, and since launching in December of that year, it's been circling the Sun, quietly taking photos of the rest of the galaxy with its billion-pixel camera - the largest ever in space.

It's so powerful, in fact, that it could resolve the width of a human hair at a distance of 1,000 kilometres. There isn't much hair in space, but there are a lot of stars - and those stars are what Gaia is interested in.

A Billion Stars

Now, scientists from the European Space Agency have used those photographs to build a three-dimensional map of our galaxy - the Milky Way. It covers an area about 100,000 light years across, and contains about a billion stars. That makes it 1,000 times more complete than any existing map of the galaxy.

Within the new map, both the position and the movement of every star is charted, allowing astronomers to figure out its distance from Earth. Data about the temperature, brightness and chemical composition of about two million of the brightest stars has also been logged.

But despite this unparalleled level of detail, the map only covers about one percent of the estimated number of stars in the Milky Way. Which is why Gaia isn't stopping any time soon - it has another two years or so left on its mission, which will be mostly spent filling out temperature and brightness data on the dimmer stars.

Thousands of New Worlds

The information that it gathers will be used to understand the origin and evolution of the Milky Way, reveal thousands of new worlds, spot asteroids that could threaten Earth, learn more about the distribution of dark matter and even test Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's thought that this first release of data alone will generate hundreds of new scientific papers.

"Over the centuries we have sought to catalogue the content of the skies," astronomer Francois Mignard, a member of the Gaia Science Team, told AFP. "But never have we achieved anything so complete or precise—it is a massive undertaking."

• Jeff Bezos' new rocket is massive - and it's called Glenn

• Duncan Geere is TechRadar's science writer. Every day he finds the most interesting science news and explains why you should care. You can read more of his stories here, and you can find him on Twitter under the handle @duncangeere.

On May 9 2016, almost the entire planet will get to experience a rare treat - a transit of Mercury across the Sun.

That's the astronomical name for what happens when Mercury's orbit brings it between the Earth and our star, casting a tiny black shadow across the solar disc. It's been a decade since the last time it happened, making it a somewhat unusual event. But with a little preparation, and some care, it's very possible to watch the celestial ballet taking place.

The easiest way is to find a local astronomical viewing event. If there's an observatory or astronomy club near you, then check to see if they're holding a viewing party of some sort - that'll be the best, and safest, way to easily see it. Plus you'll get to enjoy expert commentary and analysis. If that's not possible, though, it's pretty easy to sort out your own viewing party with only some basic astronomical equipment.

Safety first

You won't be able to see it with the naked eye. In fact, don't even try - looking directly at the Sun is very dangerous and can result in severe damage to your eyesight. Even with sunglasses or eclipse glasses, you won't see anything - the Sun is too big and bright, and Mercury is too small.

Instead, you can project the image of the Sun onto a piece of paper and view it that way. Get hold of a telescope or pair of binoculars with a magnification of 50x to 100x, along with a tripod, some duct tape and a few large pieces of stiff white card.

First, cut a hole in one of the pieces of card about the same size as the front of the telescope or binoculars - you're going to use this as a light shield. If you're using binoculars, you only need one of the lenses. Tape the shield to the front so that the lens pokes through but the light around it is blocked, and seal any leaks as best you can using duct tape or something similar.

Then position the binoculars or telescope so they're pointing towards the Sun and position another piece of card at least a foot behind the eyepiece. Don't look through the eyepiece under any circumstances - it'll literally burn a hole in your eye. Don't believe us? Here's Mark Thompson demonstrating with a pig's eye:

Getting the positioning right will take a little time and effort, so be patient if you're having difficulty and keep trying - the entire transit takes seven and a half hours, so there's no rush.

You'll know you've got it right when a bright circle appears on the card, at which point you can focus the binoculars or telescope to get it properly in focus. Then all you need to do is look for a small black spot on the surface. That's Mercury - which should be visible from 12:12pm in the UK (7:12am EDT), ending at 7:41pm (near 2:41pm EDT).

If you're watching for a while then you'll need to adjust the tripod over time to account for the rotation of the Earth, and it's also probably a good idea to give the lenses a break every so often to cool down to prevent damage.

If it's cloudy? Well, you're out of luck. But Nasa and other national space agencies will no doubt be streaming the transit online where you can benefit from the same expert commentary that you'd get from your local astronomy club.

As well as enjoying the beauty of the event, astronomers will also be using the opportunity to watch light pass through Mercury's thin atmosphere and in the process learn about how the Sun interacts with different bodies in the solar system.

Oh, and if you're reading this after 9 May 2016, don't fret. The next opportunity to see Mercury crossing the Sun will be on 11 November 2019. Mark it in your calendar, because after that you'll need to wait until 13 November 2032.

Happy sky-watching!

• The space events you have to see in 2016

Last year, NASA's New Horizons probe revealed to us some of the most stunning space imagery ever taken. Overnight, our understanding of Pluto went from a few white pixels against a black backdrop to a jaw-dropping reddish marble closeup.

It was a remarkable achievement by humanity to capture the images, which stunned astronomers. Pluto, it turns out, is not simply an inactive lump of rock, but a dwarf planet which is chemically active - as demonstrated by the relatively unscathed surface (if it was dead, we'd have seen craters like on the moon). And there was more geological diversity than could ever have been expected.

A couple of months on and the space agency has started to make sense of what it captured, and has published a new map of a 1290 mile slice of the Plutonian surface, with land categorised by the morphology and its observed terrain.

Stitched images

At the centre of the map is the nitrogen-ice plain which has become known as the Sputnik Planum. To make sure the map is reliable (and the reason why they haven't been able to do this with the whole planet yet), they have stuck to using only 12 images stitched together that have a resolution of 1050ft per pixel or better. If that doesn't sound very hi-res to you, remember that the photos were snapped at a range of 48,000 miles from the Long Range Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The hope is that the map will better allow scientists to analyse the borders between the terrain types, so they can figure out which overlap on top of which, so that a geological history of the planet can be figured out. But while they do that, we're going to carry on looking at the stunning photos.

• Here's how Pluto celebrated Christmas.

(Via Engadget.)

Hubble, we love you. The orbiting space telescope has sent us reams of awesome intergalactic images over the years, and 2015 was no different. However, there was a lot more going on space-wise, with several eclipses, encounters with new worlds, and some intrepid ISS action. There have been some stunning space reveals during 2015 (liquid water flows on Mars, anyone?), but we've concentrated only on the best images. Here's looking at you, space.

• Jamie Carter is the author of A Stargazing Program for Beginners, published this month by Springer

Did man finally conquer the solar system in 2015? Although Pluto was relegated to dwarf planet status a decade ago, there was a feeling on July 14 2015 that we had finally finished the job of photographing the rest of the planets when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed through the Pluto system after a decade-long journey. Although the probe spent barely a few hours photographing Pluto and its moons (it is travelling at 58,000 km/h, after all) and is still sending back its images, we now know Pluto has incredibly diverse geology, with mountains, ridges, dunes and craters. Not bad for a tiny icy dwarf planet.

Someone should start a religion around Hubble, such has been its profound effect on human understanding of our Universe. It will soon retire, replaced by the massive (and fully infra-red) Webb telescope, but in April it celebrated its 25th anniversary by pointing its infra-red capable Wide Field Camera 3 in the direction of the constellation of Carina. This image of star cluster Westerlund 2 revealed a fantasy landscape of glowing gas around some of the hottest, brightest and most massive stars in the Milky Way. This is where stars are born, and once again Hubble gave us a ring-side seat.

Have you ever actually seen the sun? If you've never witnessed a total solar eclipse, you won't know that the Sun isn't yellow, but pure white. The people of Svalbard, Norway and the Faroe Islands got to briefly glimpse the pulsing white streamers of its achingly beautiful corona and the huge red explosions on the sun's surface before lunch on March 20 2015 when the moon covered the disk of the sun for a couple of minutes. This is the only time anyone can stare at the sun, all while standing the rushing shadow of the moon and shivering as the sky goes dark for a few minutes during the day. Put it on your bucket-list: it's an emotional juggernaut.

If a total solar eclipse can only happen at new moon, a lunar eclipse – when the earth gets in between the sun and our satellite – can only occur at full moon. 2015 saw two to choose from on April 4 (exactly two weeks after March 20's total solar eclipse, see?) from North America and September 27-28 from North America and Europe. Erroneously termed a blood moon (it's not red) and a supermoon (which merely means it appears slightly larger in the sky), watching the earth's shadow move slowly across the surface of the moon for a couple of hours is an eerie spectacle that peaks in a colourful display of pinks and oranges.

If you'd said 67P to anyone in 2013, they would have though you were talking about the price of a Mars bar. But after the spacecraft Rosetta reached its target comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014 (and deposited the doomed Philae lander), Rosetta then spent 2015 taking the first-ever close-ups of a comet. This frame, captured on November 22 2015, when Rosetta was 127.7 km from the nucleus of the comet, shows an active region on the right, with jets of water spewing out. Somewhere down there is Philae. However with the comet now spinning away from the sun, it's mission accomplished. Bye bye, Rosetta.

While New Horizons and Rosetta were making all the headlines, NASA's Dawn spacecraft swept over Ceres on March 6 to photograph some mysterious bright spots. Within the Occator crater's mile-high sides, Dawn found intriguing marks that could be aliens, volcanoes, ice or salt deposits (the smart money is on the latter). Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

No one wants to se a rocket explode, but… well, actually, we do. Although it happened in October 2014, NASA released some spectacular images during 2015 of the catastrophic explosion of Orbital ATK's Antares rocket, which was attempting to take supplies to the International Space Station in a Cygnus spacecraft. Happily, Orbital ATK got its mojo back in early December 2015 when it successfully launched a Cygnus to the ISS, though it did have to forego using another of the suspect Antares rockets, instead relying on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket system.

It's more than a decade since NASA's Cassini probe went into orbit around Saturn, and during that time it's sent back thousands of beautiful images. It's got two years left on the clock, but 2015 saw it get as close as it will ever get to Enceladus, a moon that Cassini itself confirmed back in 2005 has an underground sea of warm, salty, liquid water. Plumes of it are jetting from fractures at the moon's south pole. Cassini performed its closest flyby in late December 2015, but on the way there it took this fine image of Enceladus in conjunction with smaller moon Tethys "floating" above Saturn's rings.

Astronauts on the ISS get to see the northern lights and southern lights every 45 minutes as their spacecraft orbits earth, but stargazing from the International Space Station isn't something that gets mentioned much. That's probably because when the lights aren't on (which is rare) someone's watching Gravity on the astronauts' new-for-2015 home cinema. However, during September NASA astronaut Scott Kelly – on day 135 of his punishing year-long mission – adjusted the exposure on his camera and captured this beautiful image of our Milky Way galaxy from near-earth orbit

OK, so we know he's not the first-ever British astronaut (that was Helen Sharman in May 1991), but 43-year-old test pilot Tim Peake's journey from Westbourne in West Sussex to the International Space Station 250 miles above us gripped the space-starved UK for one earth day last week. From the launch of his Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan to its tense manual docking with the ISS just six hours later (thanks, Russian cosmonaut commander Yuri Malenchenko), Peake's ascent rounded off the year in style. His Principia mission will last six months.

Back in 2013, student Bryan Chan and a group of his friends attached a GoPro to a weather balloon and set it off into the stratosphere from close to the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately, thanks to some patchy mobile coverage, they lost contact with the contraption as it returned to Earth.

Thanks to a passing hiker, the GoPro – and the astonishing footage on it – has now been recovered, and the result is a four-minute video you can view above. The original owners were identified by the SIM card still attached to the balloon.

According to its owners, the GoPro managed a maximum altitude of 98,664 feet (that's about 18 miles) and flew for a total of 98 minutes. The landing spot was around 50 miles away from the launch site.

Lost in space

"The problem was that the coverage map we were relying on (looking at you, AT&T) was not accurate, so the phone never got signal as it came back to Earth, and we never heard from it," explained one of the team on Reddit.

"We didn't know this was the problem at the time – we thought our trajectory model was far off and it landed in a signal dead zone."

Thanks to that lone hiker – who happened to work at the aforementioned US telecoms company AT&T – the footage was found and is available for everyone to gawp at. The balloon explosion at close to 100,000 feet is worth sticking around for too.

• Best cheap GoPro deals 2015: grab yourself an action cam

Via SlashGear

Sometimes we wonder if we had too much cheese before bedtime and we're dreaming of mad stuff such as Nokias running Android or Samsung making a smartwatch that isn't hideous and rubbish. But no! These aren't fromage-fuelled flights of fancy: they're real!

This week was all about Mobile World Congress, or MWC to its friends. It's where the great and the good of the mobile world come to strut their stuff, and that means it's possibly the most important trade show in the tech calendar.

Samsung was all over MWC, and while the Samsung Gear Fit wearable was pretty impressive the big news was the launch of the Galaxy S5. The launch wasn't a surprise, and neither was the phone: surprisingly, it turned out to lack any surprising new features.

It's the iPhone 5S to the Galaxy S4's iPhone 5, a device that "takes the DNA of [its predecessor] and improves on it in most areas," as Gareth Beavis reports. The gimmicks of the S4 are gone; this time "the phone has focused on what users might actually want." It doesn't reinvent the smartphone, but it has "a great camera, strong screen, impressive packaging, a waterproof casing and a blazingly fast engine pumping things along."

Making a splash

This year's trend appears to be waterproofing. The S5 won't be damaged by a dunk, and neither will Sony's rather nifty Xperia Z2. If you're thinking, "hang on! Didn't Sony release a flagship phone just a couple of months ago?" you're right - the Xperia Z1 has barely cut its first tooth.

"And yet here we are at MWC 2014 seeing the Xperia Z2, and it's a much better handset," Gareth says. If you thought the Z1 was pretty good, the Z2 is better still. The camera's better, the performance is fantastic and the screen's lovely.

Sony had another Z2 to show us too, the Xperia Z2 Tablet. Like its similarly named smartphone sibling, the Z2 tablet is a sequel, and once again there's more power, more RAM and a nicer screen. The speakers are better too. It's not going to set the world on fire, but that's because "Sony had already overachieved on that front in 2013." The Z2 is "a really great tablet."

Motorola had some nifty things to show us too. The firm formerly owned by Google had a "tigerish" MWC, Patrick Goss says: we "saw Moto variously hitting out at ugly wearable tech, announcing that a Motowatch was on the way, insisting that leaving Google was a good thing and laughing off questions of Motorola's demise.

Another big name came out swinging at this year's MWC: Nokia, which unveiled its Nokia X range of smartphones. The phones run a forked version of Android, which is interesting when you remember that Nokia's currently being acquired by Microsoft.

The phones are pretty nice, but don't expect to see them in your local smartphone emporium: they're aimed at the same developing market where ultra-cheap Android phones are selling in huge numbers, and the use of Microsoft services such as Outlook, Bing and OneDrive means they might act as an on-ramp for Windows Phone.

Android agitations

"Microsoft could actually benefit from Nokia's experimentation with Android," says Max Slater-Robbins: "all profits… go to Microsoft without having to spend money on building the features Android has and Windows Phone lacks." In a world where "Microsoft's services are its future, having hardware that supports that is no bad thing."

Remember HTC, which used to set the Android agenda? These days it can't even seem to get its product names right. HTC Desire 816, anyone? The name's a shame, because "there's plenty we love about it", says Hugh Langley: it looks nice, the screen's sharp and it has dual Boomsound speakers "for those spontaneous disco emergencies."

Ah, but can it survive in space? We strapped James Rogerson to a space rocket to find out. No, not really - but we did ask him to find out how well smartphones could cope in orbit. The answer, it seems, is not very well: thanks to space monsters, radiation and extreme temperature, space isn't the best place for a smartphone. No, not even a Samsung Galaxy.

• Missed anything from MWC 2014? Read out roundup from the Barcelona show