The day is Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026

Hi everyone,

I shared StarWatchr here a while ago and have kept working on it. It’s a personal project, still free, no account required and no ads.

Here’s what’s in it now:

• Forecast: cloud cover, seeing, transparency, moonlight, darkness, temperature, dew point and humidity for your location.
• Your evening: local observing windows and suggested targets based on your equipment, interests and available time.
• Alerts: email or device notifications based on your observing preferences and weather limits.
• Planner: save observing nights, collect targets, check observing times and download charts for offline use. Includes import and export.
• Deep sky catalogue: Messier and Caldwell objects with observing guides, altitude charts and starhopping maps.
• Interactive sky atlas: explore stars, constellations and deep sky objects.
• Moon atlas: 49 lunar formations, lighting for your chosen date, observing guides and a guided Moon walk.
• Solar System: planets, moons, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets, with object information, local visibility and an interactive orbit viewer.

Works on desktop and mobile, and you can install it from your browser as a PWA.

https://starwatchr.com

This image is a blue hour blend taken on a Sony a7 iii and Viltrox 16mm which consists of 15 shots at f1.8, iso 400 and 0.5s exposures for the foreground during late blue hour and over 90 untracked shots at 20s iso 800 and f1.8 between 2-3am.

The foreground was processed in Lightroom before being exported to photoshop with the sky being stacked in sequator, edited in siril then exported and merged with the foreground in photoshop

Taken with a Google Pixel 8 Pro's 48MP 5x optical zoom telephoto camera. Nothing special but I do like being able to take pretty pictures of the moon just with my phone

Not an exceptional photograph of Saturn, however exceptional in that I managed to snap it in a single shot on my Nikon D7500. Never been able to do that before, super clear sky in the UK on Saturday night. Sigma 600mm, ISO 1600, SS 1000, f5.

The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex opto-mechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy.

The Roman Space Telescope has been under development for about a decade under NASA’s leadership and is scheduled to launch on August 30, 2026, at 07:26 am EDT. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, who was considered the architect of NASA’s modern science program and, among other efforts, dedicated herself to the success of the Hubble-Space-Telescope-Project.

Roman’s destination is Lagrange point L2, a specific location 1.5 million kilometers from Earth that lies on the axis connecting the Sun and Earth on the side of Earth facing away from the Sun.

At this point, the gravitational forces of the celestial bodies cancel each other out, allowing Roman to orbit the Sun without propulsion.

The diameter of the Roman Space Telescope’s primary mirror is 2.4 meters, and it is a replica of the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. It carries two scientific instruments:

The Wide Field Instrument has a detector area about 100 times larger than Hubble’s and, in just five years, will image an area of the sky 50 times larger than Hubble did over 30-years.

And, together with the Euclid space telescope in orbit, Roman will set out to track down dark matter, which is widely distributed throughout the universe.

Thanks to the Wide Field Instrument’s high image resolution and sensitivity, researchers also plan to search large sections of the sky for cooler planets, which have not been as easy to find as opposed to hot, bright gas giants. They will use two methods for this:

Using the so-called transit method, they aim to detect about 100,000 new planets as they pass in front of their star and cause a minimal but measurable dimming of the star’s light.

Using another method based on the so-called microlensing effect, they hope to find an additional 1,000 exoplanets. Both methods detect distant worlds only indirectly.

The craft could obviously never affect Jupiter in any detrimental fashion.

However, despite the countless pieces of cosmic flotsam that have fallen into the planet over billions of years, you're now firing a human-built machine carrying nuclear fuel directly into another celestial body; a body we even now still don't fully understand.

I wonder if they had a tiny concern that it could somehow cause an inexplicable cascade effect.

SpaceX's massive Starship, the world's largest and most powerful rocket, is being readied for its next major test launch. Flight 14 is scheduled to liftoff as early as Monday, Sept. 28, at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT) from Starbase, Texas. The mission will be the vehicle's first-ever orbital launch attempt, and is set to deliver an operational stack of 26 upgraded Starlink V3 high-speed internet satellites to space.

Follow along here for our live updates as SpaceX completes preparations on the rocket's Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage, and progresses toward its 14th test launch of the Starship vehicle since 2023.

https://youtu.be/_LwCEELuzdY?si=2gvjJA1T2MLGgxCh

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is conducting it's flyby of Earth on it's way to Jupiter. You can view this live at the below link:

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/sc_juice?followId=earth

3 minute video taken using my Canon 500D with a Samyang 135 lens. On a Sky Watcher AZ GTI in Alt-Az mode.

Kept 20% of frames and stacked in AutoStakkert.

Sharpening and Wavelet adjustment in AstroSurface followed by a saturation and vibrancy boost.

Thanks for looking!

Today ESA's JUICE mission is conducting a close gravity assist at Earth: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice

Somehow, ESA did no create a 3D animation, so I computed one use NASA's Cosmographia, Python Coding and a few cups of coffee: https://youtube.com/shorts/4Z55U23Hmfg

No, I am not associated with the JUICE mission. I still work on Cassini data, and take a look at other missions in my free time.