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1 week ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Most of us take certain things like having a shower, washing our clothes and keeping clean for granted, but have you ever wondered how astronauts do these things in space? Space travel presents all kinds of challenges, from launching a rocket with enough thrust to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity, to shielding crew from the high radiation levels they’ll encounter on the journey.
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1 week ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
The 2025 summer solstice falls this weekend, 21 June at 03.42 BST (02.42 UTC), marking the first day of summer. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice is approaching (whereas our friends south of the equator will soon be experiencing their winter solstice). As you probably know, the summer and winter solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year, respectively.
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1 month ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Mars was once just a small, red pinprick of light to the naked eye. Then, with the advent of the telescope, it became another world we could observe and explore in the night sky. By the 19th century, some astronomers were claiming there was evidence of a canal-building civilisation on the Red Planet. Yet the flurry of spacecraft that began to visit Mars at the dawn of the Space Age revealed it to be a dusty, barren and inhospitable world.
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1 month ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
In theory, a Dyson sphere is a hypothetical, spherical megastructure built around a star to harvest its energy. In very rough terms, think of it as an absolutely enormous, curved solar panel. The problem with stars is that while they provide heat and light energy to the planets that orbit them – something we should obviously be grateful for, as the Sun’s energy enabled life to emerge on Earth – the vast majority of their energy simply dissipates outward into space.
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2 months ago | 
flipboard.com | Russell Deeks
Netflix racked up 11 No. 1 movies in 2025 so far — here’s the 3 worth watchingWe’re more than a third of the way through 2025 and now is a great time to take stock of which Netflix movies have claimed the No. 1 spot this year. …
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2 months ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
We thought, when we sat down to compile a list of songs about space and astronomy, that it would be a nice easy thing to do. After all, there are loads of them, aren’t there? Well, yes and no. There are certainly a million and one songs with ‘star’ or ‘sun’ or ‘cosmic’ or ‘planet’ in the title… but that doesn’t mean they’re actually ABOUT space. Taylor Swift’s ‘Starlight’, for instance, appears – as far as we can make out – to be about dancing on a yacht.
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2 months ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Renowned for its countless casinos, hotels, restaurants and entertainment venues, not to mention its neon-lit Strip – the long street on which most of the above stand – Las Vegas attracts over 40 million visitors a year, and is known as the entertainment capital of the world to some, and Sin City to others!It’s also – thanks to all that neon – often claimed to be the brightest city on Earth, as seen from space. But is it really? Well, it’s certainly brightly lit at night.
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Mar 18, 2025 | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Jupiter is the undisputed King of the Planets. It’s a gas giant, its huge mass made up of hydrogen and helium gas. Jupiter's upper atmosphere is streaked by dark belts and white zones – streams of clouds that blow in alternating directions around the planet. Caught between these are several huge storms. The largest of these, the Great Red Spot, has been raging for at least 150 years and could easily swallow the entire Earth.
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Mar 11, 2025 | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Look up during the day, and you’ll see the Sun; look up at night, and you’ll (sometimes) see a full Moon. Rather confusingly, both appear to be roughly the same size, despite most of us knowing from a very young age that the Sun is absolutely enormous, and the Moon is much smaller. So what’s going on? Quite often with space and astronomy questions such as this, there's a nice simple explanation, to which there's then a caveat “But it’s not actually as simple as that”.
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Mar 6, 2025 | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Whether you’re a follower of the Christian religion or not, Easter is an important holiday in many countries around the world. Easter Sunday 2025 falls on 20 April, though in 2026 it falls on 5 April. Why does this religious festival move around, falling anywhere from late March to late April, and what does that have to do with astronomy?
