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1 week 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month 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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1 month ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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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2 months ago | 
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?
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2 months ago | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Got a pen handy? Good… grab it. And if you haven’t, grab a tennis ball, a hairbrush or any other small, non-breakable object. Hold the object out in front of you, and let it go. What happens? The pen/hairbrush/ball/whatever falls to the ground, of course. That’s due to gravity. Gravity is the reason pens fall to Earth, the reason we all don’t go flying off into space as Earth rotates… and the reason planets orbit the Sun.
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
Once upon a time, every school child knew that there were nine planets in the Solar System, and knew their order too. Then all of a sudden, in 2006, there were eight, after Pluto was downgraded to ‘dwarf planet’ status. This followed the discovery of several similar but even larger bodies out at the edge of the Solar System, both in the Kuiper Belt and the ‘scattered disc’ that lies beyond it.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
skyatnightmagazine.com | Russell Deeks
"Where does space begin?" is one of those questions to which there’s no easy answer. Well, arguably there is: from an Earth-dweller’s perspective, 'space' begins once you get outside Earth’s atmosphere. It’s just defining where Earth’s atmosphere ends that’s the problem!That’s because Earth’s atmosphere is composed of molecules of gas, and two things molecules of gas don’t do are a) sit still and b) line up in neat, orderly rows.
