Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope precision flying means an extended life observing the Universe Extra "gas in the tank" will possibly double the latest space telescope's lifespan from 10 to 22 years plus! We chatted about the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope a couple of weeks ago. It's still early days in the life of this telescope as it heads to the L2 Lagrange Point where it will observe the Universe with the same resolution as Hubble but with a 100 times wider field of view. However, things are looking good! First of all, NASA announced this week that thanks to a precision launch and a spot-on mid-course orbit correct burn, the lifespan of the Roman Space has essentially doubled. Why does having spare fuel help extend the of the Roman Space Telescope? Throughout the life of Roman, the telescope will require a burn of its thrusters about every 28 days to maintain its position and orientation. An orbit at L2 is not entirely stable due to influences of the Moon’s gravity, solar-radiation pressure on the space telescope and evenslight variations in the combined gravitational pull of Earth and the Sun. These small correction burns are called "station keeping". Without them, Roman will drift away from L2 or lose its orientation. When this happens, it will no longer be able to operate and its mission will finish.  Because of this, the amount of fuel remaining in the spacecraft when it reaches L2 in a few months will heavily influence just how long Roman will be able to image the Universe.  The mission was originally planned to last 10 years. First of all, the spacecraft when loaded onto the SpaceX Falcon Heavy proved to lighter than first planned. A near-perfect launch placed Roman into a better than hoped-for initial position.  Fuel efficiencies during the course correction burns have bumped this number up considerably as well. This first one on the 31st of August 2026 used only 18kg of fuel instead of the planned for 200kg and this alone extended the mission life by more than 4 years. A second, upcoming burn is expected to be just as efficient.  “As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations,” said Jamie Dunn, center director at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. In other good news,  as Roman heads out to L2, mission controllers have started the process of commissioning its optical system and the results so far have been very promising.  The telescope has "opened its eyes" as the Roman team has activated the Wide Field Instrument or WFI.  Astronomers had to wait a few days after launch to allow the camera to decontaminate, dry out and cool down to math the conditions found in space.  “After years of effort to build and test the instrument on the ground, we now have confirmation that it is operational in space. This is a huge milestone for the team at Goddard, our industry teams at BAE Systems, Inc. and Teledyne, and our science centers,” said Josh Schlieder, the Wide Field Instrument scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There is much to do, but we are on our way to groundbreaking science.” There's still some calibration and focusing to be done as the camera detector array was stored away and secured for launch. I'm sure any amateur astronomer will recognize the fuzzy stars they see until they focus their own telescope. This test image captures the very first photons of starlight to reach the Wide Field Instrument on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Image via NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Tyler Desjardins (STScI) So far, very promising news for Roman and we're all waiting for the first science images from this new space telescope.  Read more here. The Moon gets a new crater Doesn't happen very often, at least by human lifespans I was chatting at BINTEL about one of our Moon maps a few weeks ago with a young astronomer who was still in primary school and who asked me a very interesting question: "Do they bring out new editions when there are new craters on the Moon?" The Moon does get new craters from meteorites and comets. It's estimated that there's over 180 small craters formed on the Moon every year that are 9m or more in diameter. Spacecraft like the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) provide regular images that allow astronomers to compare "before and after" views of the Lunar surface. (The Earth also receives an even greater number of potential impacts due to its larger size and greater gravitational attraction, however almost all of these burn up in our atmosphere. Any meteor heading towards the Moon will impact its surface as it has no such protective layer.) Larger impacts which result in craters of over 100m are much rarer events, with the likelihood of them occurring more than 120 years apart.  NASA announced this week that an impact from a meteorite or a comet the size of a six storey building* that occurred somewhere between April 11th and May 22nd, 2024 resulted in a new crater that's some 224 metres wide. The new crater was spotted when a scientist working on the LRO images, scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen “I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Robert Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system. The small circle highlights the fresh material flung out by the impact, not the crater itself. Image on the right taken. Each frame show an area of the Moon about 60km wide. Image via NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines/Robert Wagner Why can't we narrow this date down a little more? Was the actual impact observed? No. The body that impacted the Moon to form this latest crater wasn't spotted as it headed towards the Moon and the event itself also wasn't captured either from telescopes on Earth or from spacecraft orbiting the Moon.  Can I see this new crater with my telescope? No. Even big amateur telescopes can only spot Lunar features down to about 1km and this crater is awkwardly placed on the eastern limb of the Moon for observation from Earth.  You might be able to spot the ejecta blanket or the material thrown out by the impact which covers a larger area, but not the crater itself. Even this would be only a tiny spot in an image taken with big gear. You're better off enjoying the LRO and other images. A close-up of the new Crater McGetchin Going back to the original question about how often we need to update Moon maps, we generally don't need to. New craters on the Moon that are 100m or more only occur every few human lifespans and even these are too small to be recorded on Moon maps.  Read more about this event the at the NASA site here.  Spring Equinox this week Image via timeanddate.com The Spring Equinox in Australia for this year happens on Wednesday, 23 September 2026 Sydney time. This is when all parts of the Earth experience about the same length of night and day and when the Sun crosses over the celestial equator into the southern part of the sky.  In many parts of the world, especially in the northern hemisphere it marks the start of autumn. However in Australia we mark spring as starting on the 1st of September. The date of the equinoxes move around by a day or two and this way records were kept consistent to help with farmers.  Did Venus swallow its own moon? That super bright "star" you can spot tonight in the western sky just after the Sun sets is Venus. It reaches its peak brightness for the evening in 2026 this week on the 22nd of September, shining at magnitude −4.78 or over 20 times brighter than Sirius. We've had a lot of folks asking us here at BINTEL "I've seen this really bright star in the early evening sky and wondered if it was a plane or helicopter but is doesn't seem to move!" Yes, it's Venus we tell them and its a wonderful sight at the moment.  One of the things that stands out about the Earth compared to the other inner rocky planets is that we have a large natural satellite. In fact our Moon is the largest in comparison to Earth than all the other planets in the Solar System. You could almost call the Earth and Moon a binary planet system. Given just how close the Earth and Venus are size wise, why Venus never scored its own moon has always puzzled astronomers. Now a team led by Stephen R. Kane from the University of California, Riverside, have spent time trying to recreate computationally the early history of Venus and whether it could have held onto a large moon.  In some of these scenarios, Venus' gravity could have torn a moon apart and then sent the remains crashing into its surface. This would have changed the Venusian surface and altered its ability to hold onto water. It also would have been a major factor in the conditions we see at Venus today.  “When I made this discovery, I was shocked,” Kane said. “I thought surely the broad range of scenarios I was exploring would lead to a variety of results. But it all went pretty much in the same direction.” Venus. Image via: NASA/JPL/Caltech This doesn't answer the question about whether Venus ever had a large moon. Rather it points towards if one was captured or formed through a collision like our own Moon was, there was a good chance it would have not been able to orbit Venus for billions of years. The findings also have implications for Earth-like exoplanets orbiting other stars. “When people think about Earth twins around other stars, one question they ask is, ‘Does it have a moon?’” Kane said. Read more about it here. Mercury might have shrunk more than we originally thought The closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is also in the news at the moment as new spacecraft prepares to start observing the planet. We've also known for over 50 years that Mercury is shrinking. Flybys of the planet by the Mariner 10 spacecraft launched 1973 showed a series of enormous curved cliffs called, lobate scarps, some of which were sometimes hundreds of kilometres long and more than a kilometre high. These were signs of the outer crust no longer fitting around the cooling and shrinking metallic core. The amount of shrinking was not thought to be that much at first, maybe one or two km. The MESSENGER spacecraft which orbited around Mercury from 2011 to 2015 found many more scarps and wrinkle ridges and these results were used to bump the shrinkage to about 7km. Think of these as wrinkles appearing on a piece of fruit as it dries out and shrinks.  Researchers from Hokkaido University, in collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and The University of Tokyo, have looked at these results and realised they were off by about 10–30% and Researchers now estimate that Mercury may have contracted by 10–30% more than previous calculations suggested. Its radius may have decreased by as much as 11.5 kilometres, equivalent to a reduction of about 23 kilometres across its diameter, since the planet formed. This is because some of the later impacts and the debris thrown up, called ejecta, might have covered up some of the older scarps. Basically the Mariner 10 and MESSENGER spacecraft were not seeing just how much "wrinkling" there was on Mercury's surface. Artist impression of the MESSENGER spacecraft in orbit at Mercury. Image via NASA Is Mercury still shrinking today? Yes, but the inner core has cooled significantly and the amount is likely small. Most of the contraction of the planet would have occurred much earlier in the Solar System's history. What's next? The BepiColombo spacecraft has almost arrived at Mercury and is about to begin its science mission. We'll hopefully learn more in the coming months and years. Where to spot the Solar System's inner planets tonight Both Mercury and Venus will be visible in the western evening sky as the Sun sets. There's no missing Venus as it will be the brightest "star" in the evening sky by a long way! Mercury will be trickier. Mercury as seen tonight, 19th September 2026, from Sydney at about 6.20pm. It will be hard to spot being so low in the western sky just after sunset When you head outside this weekend to look up at the three closest neighbours to us in the Solar System, it's worth remembering that astronomers are always finding ways to learn more about these ancient bodies.  Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 19th September 2026 *Not sure how big that is compared to the other measure of astronomical units, "the corgi".

The first spacecraft to another star revealed Will take 80,000 years to get close to Alpha Centauri, but hey, it's the thought that counts. A private consortium this week announced a surprisingly low-cost mission to what might be the most ambitious destination of any space launch so far: the region around our closest star, Alpha Centauri. The project aims to launch a small spacecraft carrying a payload of at least 1 kg and measuring 10 x 10 x 10 cm. The spacecraft would be deliberately placed on a trajectory towards Alpha Centauri. The team hopes to design, build, launch and operate the mission for less than US$15 million, with liftoff planned before the end of 2029. Fundraising and the search for technical partners are now underway. You can learn about the project here. Why on Earth are people doing this? It's a good question! It's more of a case that we are at the point where such a mission can be seriously considered. With everything going on in the world, knowing that our civilisation has at least started the journey to another star is something truly inspirational.  How will it escape the Sun's gravity and head to another star? What do you mean "the region around"? Why not just go to the star system itself? Fermi Explorer will not be able to make course corrections over the millennia it will take to get to Alpha Centauri. Even spacecraft flying around the inner Solar System need to make occasional changes to their flight paths. The path away the Sun's while keeping the mission cost low is complex. The other issue is that the positions and distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri will change as the stars move through the Milky Way and exactly what is in the interstellar medium it will encounter during the journey is not fully understood.  Working out the proposed flight path had been a problem, until a specialist AI system developed by Physical Superintelligence (PSI) had a crack at it and found a solution that hadn't occurred to the Fermi Explorer team.  Read about their solution here. Won't the Voyager probes and New Horizon end up outside the Solar System? Yes, however they haven't been "aimed" at any star system in particular. Both Voyager I and 2 will "fly by" other stars in roughly 40,000 years but at distances the better part of 2 light years.  New Horizon is flying at a slower rate than the hot rod Voyager probes and will take at least several 10,000s of years to get as far as one light year.  What will be at Alpha Centauri when Fermi Explorer finally gets there in 80,000 odd years? Given the rate of human technology, probably a large group of onlookers ready to welcome the historic, first interstellar space probe. The Macquarie University Astronomy Open Night is sold out. If you're attending, make sure you swing by the BINTEL stand as we'll have plenty to show you!  The popular event always sells out ahead of time It might be sold out, but if you scored tickets on one of Australia's biggest astronomy events at Macquarie Uni in Sydney on September 19th, there's plenty to see and do. Make sure you swing by the BINTEL stand in the main exhibition area.   You'll be able to see the latest from some of our major partners including the new ZWO Seestar S50 Pro along with a ZWO S30 Pro, gear from OM System, Benro, Fujinon as well as a Celestron Origin Home Observatory. Of course, you can have a chat with members of the BINTEL team who are always happy to talk about all things astronomy, telescopes, astrophotography, smart telescopes and more.  Did you see the media coverage of new Powerhouse Parramatta observatory featuring Planewave, Sky-Watcher and Celestron Telescopes? Yes, they're from BINTEL There's been a lot of news this week about the opening of Powerhouse Parramatta and one of the major feature of this wonderful new facility in western Sydney will be the its new observatory  We were honoured to be asked to provide a wide range of equipment for this new observatory.  When you attend an observing session at Powerhouse Parramatta, some of the astronomy gear supplied by BINTEL that you'll be using includes:  PlaneWave CDK350 Observatory System PlaneWave Delta Rho 350 and L-350 mount A range of ZWO Cooled Astronomy Cameras Pegasus SmartEye Sky-Watcher Esprit 150ED APO Refractor telescopes Celestron StarSense Explorer 12" Dobsonian Lunt LS60mm telescope for daytime Solar viewing Plus more! You can read more the ABC News link here. It's especially significant for Sydney astronomers as it is opening in the year of the 200th anniversary of the discovery of famous deep-sky objects from the original Paramatta Observatory by James Dunlop, including NGC 5128 (the galaxy Centaurus A) and the barred spiral galaxy, NGC 4945. You can read our blog article from a few months ago celebrating that special evening in 1826 here.  There is a memorial to Paramatta Observatory that's only a few hundred metres from Powerhouse Parramatta and its modern, high-tech telescopes.  Hubble spots Saturn's newly discovered Decagon storm An irregular hexagonal cloud band was first observed by the two Voyager probes as they flew past Saturn in 1981, and its discovery was made in 1987 when researchers further analyzed the Voyager images and made more detailed observations with the Cassini probe.  While it needed a space probe to make the discovery, advances in amateur gear, along with camera and imaging techniques means Saturn's northern polar hexagonal bands can be captured. For example, check out Andy Casely's post to the BINTEL Society Facebook group here. This week, astronomers announced that a similar and still apparently evolving 10-sided atmospheric wave has formed around Saturn’s south pole. The feature was first noticed in ground-based images contributed by amateur astronomers, while Hubble observations confirmed its presence and traced faint indications of it back to 2023. Composite images of Saturn released this week by NASA showing a 10-sided storm in the planet's southern hemisphere  "We've never seen anything quite like this in Saturn's southern hemisphere," said Amy Simon, study co-author and OPAL principal investigator, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The northern hexagon has been there every time we've looked for more than 40 years. This feature is different — it appears to be strengthening, giving us the rare opportunity to watch a giant atmospheric pattern develop." You can read more about this discovery here.  It's worth pointing out that you won't be able to spot this storm, even with the telescopes BINTEL supplies. Well, not yet anyway.... What's in the sky for September 2026? It's spring 2026! We've just emerged from what was possibly the warmest winter on record Due to the current El Niño which is shaping up be one of the most severe ever recorded, the next few months are likely to be above average temperatures. I've even woken up to news of a total fire ban in Sydney today! How that will translate into cloud cover across the country remains to be seen. I've reached out to the Australian BOM for some comments.  In the meantime, there's some wonderful viewing above our heads each night. Here's a sky chart prepared by Geoff Wyatt of how the southern sky will appear at around 8.00pm in September 2026.  Cheers, Earl White 5th September 2026

Australia's largest optical telescope needs your help We almost never ask members of the BINTEL community to get involved with local causes, however this is an exception! Most of our readers would be familiar with The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) which is located at the Siding Spring Observatory just outside Coonabarabran in NSW, which many people call the astronomy capital of Australia.  This is the largest optical telescope in Australia and constructed at time when just about all major telescopes were located in the northern hemisphere. Currently there are no other large optical telescopes planned for Australia.  The AAT over the decades has produced a vast quantity of astronomical research and for quite a few years was regarded as one of the most productive telescopes on planet Earth.  As of the time of writing, the future of the AAT is up in the air. I was sent this by Professor Karl Glazebrook, in his role as AAT Council Chair which offers some further reading. (Karl's also a keen Seestar S50 user!) In a nutshell, the Federal Government's funding for the AAT is due to expire on the 30th of June 2027. In the next few years, our largest optical telescope will complete its current programs that includes wide field survey, exploring the evolution of our galaxy, and planets orbiting other stars. The issue is, what happens after that? Funding is uncertain at this stage.  At a local level, Coonabarabran and surrounding areas are at the very heart of Astro Tourism in Australia and either short or long term mothballing of the AAT would be a terrible blow to the region and we'd lose a remarkable experience for inspiring the next generation of Australian astronomers.  There's a vigorous local campaign underway to help raise awareness of this situation and to preserve and develop Astro Tourism for the Coonabarabran region. There are a number of ways to get involved to help keep this valuable resource open. You can visit their change.org petition here. I spoke today with Mark Osmond, one of the folks behind this campaign and he summed up the situation by saying that both professional and amateur astronomers across the country of all levels would be staggered if they realised their beloved AAT faces an uncertain future.  You can find a range of extra resources to help you learn more about possible future plans here.  Plus, the Siding Spring Observatory is the direct path of the Total Solar Eclipse in July 2028! ZWO Seestar S30 Pro or Seestar S50 Pro which one is right for you? This week saw the biggest astro product launch of 2026 (well at least so far...). It would be hard to miss the roll out of the new ZWO Seestar S50 Pro. This has grabbed the attention of many of our existing customers, many of whom are adding to their existing collection of regular and smart telescopes, as well as those who are starting off their astro journey with a Seestar S50 Pro. You will spot a vast number of videos from the various YouTubers and other influencers who've been busily going through the spec and comparing the new S50 Pro to the existing S30 Pro. They all seem to be quite informative and entertaining, and after spending a couple of late nights watching them on the large screen with my long-suffering Chihuahuas, I'd suggest you do the same.  Because of the large amount of helpful detail on offer online, I won't do a deep-dive into the specs of the new telescope, but there's a few highlights worth mentioning. New image sensor and upgraded optics = larger FOV (Field of View) This is the biggie. In much the same way ZWO upgraded the Seestar S30 to the S30 Pro with a larger 3840 x2160 4k sensor and improved 4-element APO optics, the same changes were made to the Seestar S50 to produce the Seestar S50 Pro.  This means the Seestar S50 Pro will capture a much wider field of view compared to the older Seestar S50, imaging almost 4 times the sky area. The upgraded APO (Apochromatic) means sharper details as well. By comparison, S30 Pro will cover some 150% more sky than the S50 Pro. What does the larger (50mm vs 30mm) main lens mean for my astro images? A larger lens collects more light and reveals finer details. This means the images produced by the S50 Pro will be "sharper" in nebulae and galaxies and stars will be brighter for exposure of the same length.  Why do I want to capture a larger chunk of the sky? Shouldn't I want to "zoom" in as much as possible to see small astro objects? One of the surprising things that anyone starting off in astronomy quickly finds out is how large many deep-sky object appear, often covering several times the size of the Full Moon in the night sky. Regions containing nebulae and star clusters might be spread over several square degrees, whereas the Moon whereas the Moon is only about half a degree across. These astro objects are faint though and that's why long exposures with a telescope like the S50 Pro will reveal intricate details and colours.  An official ZWO image showing the respective FOV (fields of view) of the original S50, S30 and the newer S30 Pro and S50 Pro models Other improvements Apart from increased onboard storage, one other major improvement to the S50 Pro is the inclusion of a second, wide-field lens and camera system. This is designed for taking astro panoramas, especially of the rich details contained in the Milky Way. We've seen many BINTEL customers take stunning photos of the Milky Way, especially during our Australian and Kiwi winters, using DSRL/mirrorless cameras and star tracker mounts to handle long exposures as the world spins beneath our feet.  The wide angle cameras in the Seestar Pro models also let you produce your own portrait of our home galaxy, but with a very special feature. A Milky Way panorama with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro There is some confusion about how much AI is used by these Smart Telescopes. They DO NOT use AI to generate images. Instead, they have AI features to help assist with image composition and processing.  For example, they can "lock" the foreground features like the buildings and scenery in the image above, while tracking the stars and dust clouds as they revolve above our heads during a long exposure and combine the two to help your own astro masterpiece.   Bottom line, what does BINTEL think of the Seestar S50 Pro? As we're the only place in the Southern Hemisphere and one of only a handful of stores that sell all the various makes of Smart Telescopes on offer including ZWO, DWARF Lab, Celestron Origin, Unistellar and Vaonis, we're in a unique position to offer some independent and unbiased thoughts on what would the best for you and your astronomy plans.  Some of the Smart Telescopes currently on display BINTEL's Sydney store including the ZWO Seestar S50, S30 Pro, S50 Pro, DWARF Lab min, Vaonis Vespera and Unistellar.   In our opinion both the ZWO Seestar ZWO S30 and S50 Pro are capable of producing amazing astrophotos even in the hands of complete beginners and have the features to grow as your skills grow.  There is no hard answer as to which is best and it would be worthwhile considering how you'd like to use your new ZWO Seestar, especially if you are planning to travel with it.  The Seestar S50 Pro would be better for you if: You wanted the highest level of detail on deep-sky objects You're ok with a larger telescope, tripod and carrycase The Seestar S30 Pro would be better for you if: Travelling with your telescope is important or compact storage is a priority Capturing deep-sky objects that cover larger parts of the night sky You'd prefer a more affordable option (If you're thinking about upgrading from a Seestar S50 to the new Pro version, check out our blog here.)  Either way you will be quickly photographing the Universe. We've supplied ZWO Seestars to many hundreds of our customers over the last few years and are thrilled there's a new kid on the block. Does FOV (Field of View) matter for space telescopes? Speaking of FOV upgrades, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launching this evening our time has a massive FOV compared to previous space telescopes such as Hubble. Hubble's FOV in the top left compared to the FOV of the Roman Space Telescope. Image via NASA Roman will have a FOV some 200 times larger than Hubble while retaining the same roughly the same resolution. This means the "postage stamp" views produced by Hubble can be replaced with a wider and far more detailed views of the sky.  Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Susan Benecchi commented that Roman's wide FOV will help astronomers track moving objects that are often simply too faint to spot on their own individual images. It will “start to sample some of those smaller objects that we think of as the building blocks of planets.” by comparing different images and spotting moving objects.  You can read more about how Roman will help Solar System science here.  We'll be bringing news of Roman's launch next week! Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 29th August 2026      

Hubble points to our Milky Way's ancient past We've known for some time that the Milky Way is the result of a number of mergers and collisions with smaller galaxies stretching back billions of years. Some of these collisions such as the one with the Sagittarius Dwarf that started about 6 billion years are actually still underway! Before that, the Milky Way consumed a galaxy referred to as the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus around10 billion years ago. In the distant future, the Milky Way will merge with the Andromeda galaxy, most likely on a Tuesday afternoon, although some astronomers are not certain of this happening.  Many of the larger galaxies we observe are the results of these types of mergers and we have a ring-side seat to see these. Being embedded into one of the arms of the Milky Way it's been harder to establish the history of own galaxy.  “Our home is the Milky Way galaxy, but we do not know how our house was built,” said Davide Massari, lead author, Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna in Italy. “In this paper we discover where the first significant batch of bricks came from: a dwarf galaxy that we call LKH.” An illustration of the early collision of galaxies in the Milky Way's history. Image via NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) The used the Hubble Space Telescope to examine globular clusters, large groups of stars that are so tightly bound together by gravity and their stars tall formed at the same time and evolve together. They're also some of the most spectacular objects to view through a telescope and we've covered them in more detail in a blog post here. Stars in some of these globular clusters were found to have formed outside the Milky Way and are remnants of the earlier LKH galaxy.  This discovery points to have merger occurring 11.8 billion years ago, extending the known merger timeline 1.8 billion back in into the past. The LKH dwarf galaxy is estimated to have contained around 500 million solar masses in stars which was a significant percentage of the mass of the Milky Way at the time.  “Some past studies have argued that the earliest phases of our galaxy’s evolution were defined by stars born only in our galaxy,” says Massari. “Here, we have shown that stars born in external galaxies also need to be considered.” More studies of these globular clusters are planned to continue digging into the Milky Way's past.  One thing to note about galaxy mergers is that while billions of stars, planets, vast interstellar gas clouds and dark matter "whack" into each other, due to the enormous distance between these objects, physical collisions between stars don't occur. Think of it more as thin clouds of smoke blowing into each other,   Read more here Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to launch An exciting time for astronomers as the latest space telescope is heading to space ahead of time and under budget! It's due to head into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket next Sunday our time from the Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Named after NASA's Dr. Nancy Grace Roman who was the space agency's first chief astronomer and often called the "mother of Hubble". A NASA illustration of the Roman Space Telescope Roman's main 2.4 metre diameter mirror is the same size as Hubble, but only a quarter the weight due to advances in material technologies in the decades since. Camera This wide-field space telescope carries The Wide Field Instrument, or WFI.  This is a 300-megapixel infrared camera that will give Roman the sameangular resolution as Hubble, however it will capture around 100 times the field of view of Hubble and larger than a full Moon.  It will also carry a Coronagraph, which will cover the bright disk of stars in the hope of revealing faint details of their exoplanets.  Science We'll cover what Roman hopes to achieve in coming articles, but some of its main objects include study dark matter and energy, explore exoplanets and the structure of the Universe. Where is it being sent to? Roman is headed to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, about 1.6 million km away, where its stable orbit will be balanced between the Sun and the Earth. The Earth won't block much the view, and the space telescope will be less impacted by heat. This is also the same orbit where the James Webb Space Telescope is located. Very chance of them colliding however as they'll be in orbits millions of kms apart... Catch the best globular cluster tonight  Speaking of globular clusters, you can easily spot tonight the brightest of them and the largest one in the Milky Way galaxy, Omega Centauri. The view from Sydney towards the southwest tonight, 22nd Aug, at about 6.30pm You will see the Southern Cross on its "side" and Omega Centauri sits in the rich star clouds that in that part of the sky. It's just on the edge of visibility with your eyes, a small fuzzy ball in binoculars and a simply amazing sight in a telescope of any size.  How good is the view? Many of our customers just starting out on their astronomy journey pop in to see me at BINTEL and ask whether they'll be able to see rings of Saturn or the bands and moons of Jupiter. I tell them, "Yes, but just wait until you see Omega Centauri!" Plus, Omega Centauri mightn't be from the Milky Way.  Astronomers consider it a left over core of a dwarf galaxy the Milky Way ate billions of years ago.  When you peer up at it tonight, you're looking at the same kind of galaxy leftover the Hubble team has been checking out. Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 22nd August 2026 

The largest 2D map of the Universe has been released. 5.6 trillion pixels and you can explore from your computer Astronomers have released the largest 2D map of the Universe this week, with 5.6 trillion pixel and almost 4 billion celestial object and maps about three-quarters of the sky. It contains nebulae, black holes, asteroids, and of course, lots and lots of galaxies. It builds on previous DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys which in themselves have become standards for referencing the known Universe. The NSF Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile which contributed data to the survey “It’s part of the fabric of astronomy research now,” says David Schlegel, a co-lead of the Legacy Surveys and scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). “When you're working with astronomical objects today, you often start by pulling up the Legacy Imaging Viewer to see what you’re looking at.”  There's an online viewer where you explore the data here. (Warning though, it is addictive and I'm probably already spent too much time cruising around the night sky with it....) Read more here Venus reaches greatest elongation for 2026. A great time to see it! Greatest elongation is when an inferior planet, one closer to the Sun than the Earth, ie Mercury or Venus, appears furthest apart from the Sun, For Venus, this happens at 4.00pm Sydney on the 15th August 2026. (August 15, 2026, at 06:00 UTC).   As Venus appears at its longest distance from the Sun in the sky, it will be visible for quite a while in the early evening and appear high in the sky. After the Moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky and is certainly putting on a display at the moment as it shines at about magnitude -4.4.   Venus and a very thin crescent Moon at around 6.30pm, Saturday 15th August 2026 as seen in the westerly sky from Sydney. Image via Stellarium.  Here's a map that shows where to see Venus in the next few nights, although it will be very hard to miss! You can enjoy the planet with just your eyes as a bright "star" and even a small telescope will reveal it as about half phase.  What's a Black Hole Star? Say G'day to MoM-BH*-1 It's not often scientists announce an entirely new type of astronomical object, but that's what happened this week with what's been labelled a Black Hole Star. (Not to be confused with the Soundgarden song "Black Hole Sun"...) Along the way, it might just have help solve a recent cosmic mystery. Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began observations, it started finding what have been called "Little Red Dots." These are were announced in March 2022 and had astronomers scratching their heads as to what they were. They appeared in large numbers and dated back to some 600 million to 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang. What these compact, luminous, red sources of light were in the early Universe, and their nature remains under active investigation. MoM-BH*-1 was the brightest object of this type spotted during the Mirage or Miracle (MoM) survey by Webb. Its red colour was made even redder by the expansion of the Universe, but its colour would normally suggest something surrounded by a cloud of dust, however its appearance suggested there wasn't much there.  It's surprisingly bright, with the exception of a wavelength where a sharp change in brightness occurs. This is called a Balmer break, often a sign of dense gas absorbing light from a star forming without much dust around it.  As a further head scratcher,  MoM-BH*-1’s Balmer break was stronger than ever observed with a star. It's way too bright to have been generated by the nuclear fusion process, which powers stars such as our Sun. “It is a very special thing to find an object with no comparison, given the vast stores of data on billions of stars, galaxies and black holes that we have in our archival databases,” study co-author Rohan Naidu, said study co-author Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the University of Hawaiʻi., “MoM-BH*-1 is one in a billion!” Computer simulations by Naidu and his team point towards a strange hybrid object, which is a combination of a central black hole some 50 millions times the mass of the Sun surrounded by a cloud of gas about the size of the Solar System. The brightness of these little red dots is so bright it outshines its host, early galaxy in a range of wavelengths. MoM-BH*-1 as seen by the JWST image via the researchers The odd little red dot “shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars,” said Naidu. There will be further studies of other little red dots especially about early galaxy and black hole formation, but it looks we can add Black Hole Stars to the growing list of astronomical objects that have been discovered.  Cheers, Earl White BINTEL 15th August 2026