September 2026 – nightShifted Astronomy

Delta Cephei Rises High This Fall

Posted on September 30, 2026September 27, 2026

Delta Cephei, the namesake of the Cepheid variables, sits in a compact triangle at the southeastern corner of Cepheus’s house-shaped pattern. From mid-northern latitudes it is circumpolar, so it never sets, but it is most comfortable to observe on autumn and winter evenings when the constellation stands high in the north. Start with Cassiopeia’s familiar W (or M) and hop toward the “roof” of the house, or use the Big Dipper’s pointers through Polaris and continue another fist-width onward. Once you have the little triangle, Delta is the peak; Zeta Cephei (about magnitude 3.6) and Epsilon Cephei (about 4.2) form the base and serve as ready-made comparison stars. A planetarium app on night mode or a simple printed chart is enough to lock the field the first time.

The star itself pulses from roughly magnitude 3.5 at brightest to 4.4 at faintest every 5.366 days, rising quickly over about a day and a half and then fading more slowly. Under reasonably dark skies the change is obvious to the unaided eye if you glance back and forth between Delta and its two neighbors; from suburban sites a pair of 7×50 or 8×40 binoculars makes the estimates easier and more repeatable. Note the date and time to the nearest quarter-hour, decide whether Delta looks equal to, halfway between, or closer to one comparison star, and log the estimate. Repeating the same comparison on every clear night for two or three weeks quickly reveals the classic sawtooth light curve and turns a casual look into a real measurement.

A small telescope adds a second treat: Delta is a pretty double, a golden-yellow primary with a pale blue-white companion about 41 arcseconds to the south-southwest. Keep magnifications modest so both stars stay in the same field, and remember that moonlight or thin haze will flatten the contrast of the variable itself. The same patch of sky also rewards a slow sweep for nearby clusters and nebulae, so once you have made your magnitude estimate you can linger. Consistency matters more than perfect conditions; a few minutes of careful comparison on successive nights will teach you more about this historic star than a single long session ever could.

Astronomers Find Local Black Hole Jets

Posted on September 28, 2026September 28, 2026

Astronomers have confirmed the first known microblazar in the Milky Way: a stellar-mass black hole whose relativistic jet happens to be pointed almost directly at Earth. The system, catalogued as IRAS 18293-0941 and lying only about 12,000 light-years away, consists of a black hole and a companion star that completes an orbit every 11.38 days. Material stripped from the star forms an accretion disk that powers two jets racing outward at three-quarters the speed of light. One of those jets is aimed toward us; the opposite jet only becomes visible because it slams into a nearby molecular cloud, carving a bubble and heating gas until it glows.

The object had been sitting in infrared catalogues for decades, hidden behind thick dust that rendered it invisible in ordinary optical images. High-resolution radio observations with the European VLBI Network, combined with the precise stellar position from Gaia, finally pinned the jet to the binary itself rather than to some distant background galaxy. Where the receding jet strikes the cloud, particles appear to be accelerated to energies that may reach the petaelectronvolt range, making this modest stellar system one of the galaxy’s more efficient natural particle accelerators.

The discovery fulfills a theoretical prediction that has been on the books for thirty years. Researchers now plan to watch the jet evolve and to hunt for additional microblazars, which could turn out to play a quiet but important role in how galaxies process energy and cosmic rays. Rest easy, though: at this distance the beam poses no threat to Earth. It is simply a beautifully aligned laboratory sitting in our own backyard.

Crater May Unlock The Origin of Phobos

Posted on September 25, 2026September 21, 2026

Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, remains one of the Solar System’s more stubborn puzzles. Only about 22 kilometers across and racing around the planet every 7 hours and 39 minutes, it could be either a captured asteroid or the leftover debris from a giant impact that once struck the Red Planet. Researchers now argue that the answer may lie inside the moon itself; specifically beneath Stickney, the 9-kilometer crater that dominates one face of Phobos.

Stickney is more than a scar. If Phobos formed from Martian impact debris, the crater may date to roughly 4.2 billion years ago; if the moon was captured, the impact could be closer to 2.6 billion years old. Modeling presented at the European Geosciences Union and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests the collision may have melted and compressed rock beneath the crater floor, leaving a denser mass that would slightly alter Phobos’s gravity field, moments of inertia, and tiny wobble, or libration. Detecting that signature would constrain how mass is arranged inside the moon.

That interior is thought to be porous, possibly ice-bearing, and loosely bound; more like a rubble-pile asteroid than a solid rock. Such a “sponge-like” structure might explain how so small a body survived an impact that ought to have shattered it. Reconciling Phobos’s irregular shape, low density, spectral properties, and decaying orbit in a single geophysical model remains difficult, because the moon sits so close to Mars that the planet’s gravity overwhelms Phobos’s own weak field.

Time is limited. Phobos is slowly spiraling inward and will eventually break apart or strike Mars. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission, targeted for launch later in 2026, is designed to fly in a challenging quasi-orbit around the moon, collect surface samples with a core drill and a NASA-contributed pneumatic sampler, and return them to Earth by about 2031. Those measurements and rocks should finally show whether Stickney hides the compressed fingerprint of Phobos’s origin.

Scientists Measure Black Hole Formations

Posted on September 23, 2026September 21, 2026

JWST observations of galaxies less than a billion years after the Big Bang revealed unexpectedly massive black-hole “seeds,” which is hard to explain if those objects had to grow from ordinary stellar-mass remnants. That tension has revived the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) picture: a massive, metal-poor gas cloud in the center of an early galaxy collapses in one shot into a heavy seed rather than assembling through a long chain of mergers.

An international team led by Alessandro Trinca used dark-matter merger trees from high-resolution N-body simulations, then fed those histories into the Cosmic Archaeology Tool to track which halos could actually form DCBHs. The models show that the most favorable sites are cosmic over-densities—regions already packed with gas, dust, and merging dark-matter clumps. Direct collapse can begin as early as about 500 million years after the Big Bang and continues until metal enrichment from the first supernovae shuts the channel down a few hundred million years later.

Those results give observers a concrete target: the descendants of DCBHs should turn up as companion AGN near bright quasars at redshift ~7. Finding a large population of such neighbors in future JWST surveys would be strong evidence that the first supermassive black holes grew in clustered, over-dense environments rather than in isolation.

Martian Atmosphere as Fuel?

Posted on September 21, 2026

Much has been written to hype colonization of the Moon, Mars, and other bodies in our solar system. But there are still many challenges faced by potential colonists in such a future. Chief among those concerns it that of fuel. We can carry much of the fuel we need to get to these places from Earth, but what happens when we get there? Outposts will need ways to synthesize their own fuel in order to return to Earth or to maintain their equipment and habitats. Enter a team at MIT that is looking to the Martian atmosphere itself for answers.

MIT Ph.D. Candidate Lanie McKinney is working on a device that would pull gases from Mars’ heavy atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide to support life support systems and propellant systems.

According to Universe Today, McKinney and a team of cross-discipline researchers are examining ways that a unique device called the Nanosecond Repetitively Pulsed Dielectric Barrier Discharge (NRP-DBD) that uses an oxygen-selective membrane to extract oxygen rapidly from carbon dioxide. While the proof-of-concept work seems promising, there are still some efforts that need to be undertaken to address concerns after oxygen conversion.

An interesting point that is not addressed in the article is how this kind of technology could be utilized on our own planet. If carbon dioxide is seen as such a dangerous gas in our own atmosphere, it seems like this would be an exceptional option for creating pollution-reductant fuels…

International Observe the Moon Day

Posted on September 19, 2026September 15, 2026

Today is International Observe the Moon Day, which is a project that began in 2010 to bring people together to learn more about our planet’s natural satellite. Since the program began in 2010, people around the world have participated through lunar observations, hands-on activities, artwork, music, and more.

NASA keeps a collection of events on their website and there are many amateur astronomy clubs across the world that are always ready to jump at an opportunity to show off their telescopes, so be sure to look them up!

Find out more on NASA’s website: https://science.nasa.gov/moon/observe-the-moon-night/

Roman Space Telescope – 22 Years of Science?

Posted on September 17, 2026

I’m a bit late getting to post tonight, but here we go!

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which I will henceforth refer to simply as the Roman Space Telescope, is quite an enigma as far as government space observatories go. Especially at a time when much of what the public knows as an example of a large-scale telescope is the long-delayed, long over-budget, but eventually launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In the case of Roman, its design was refined over the years and it actually was delivered to NASA at almost 1,000kg lighter than originally intended.

That lighter design allowed NASA to put additional fuel into the telescope to boost its potential mission length. Then, things got good! When the engine made its burn to enter the L2 Lagrange point, the burn was 90% more efficient than expected; only burning 18 kg of the 200 kg engineers expected.

With all of that in mind, Roman now has enough fuel on board to potentially conduct science operations for 22 years! The potential boost to the mission’s lifespan really speaks to the engineering prowess and technical expertise of all the teams involved with this project. Personally, I’m excited to see what new mysteries Roman opens up for us!

Read the full article: https://www.space.com/astronomy/22-years-of-science-nasas-roman-space-telescope-doubles-its-lifetime-with-super-precise-engine-burn

Voyager 6 – NASA’s Sacred Son

Posted on September 16, 2026

In 1979, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the newly refit USS Enterprise once again took to the stars to defend humanity against certain destruction in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The film, which has been a polarizing experience for Trek fans throughout the years, introduced the legendary antagonist of humanity’s own creation… V’Ger. The leviathan starship, shrouded behind a mysterious stellar cloud, returns to Earth in search of its creator and the Enterprise is sent to intercept. Over time, we learn that V’Ger is actually an old NASA probe, Voyager 6, that was discovered lost in space by a race of alien machines. The machine world saw V’Ger as a savior sent from the stars, so they fixed him and sent him back to his creator. When V’Ger returns to Earth, he is determined to find his creator, even if it means removing all of the humans from Earth to find him.

What we ultimately learn is that V’Ger’s creator is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that put the first man on the Moon and that was getting ready to head back into space aboard the Space Shuttle. At the heart of the V’Ger cloud was a bowl-like structure designed to support and protect the Voyager 6 probe. The whole design is one of the most incredible alien creations in science fiction, even if the film itself is often considered one of the weaker entries in the franchise. Personally, it’s one of my favorites.

But the Star Trek production team did much more than simply look at photos of the Voyager 1 and 2 probes when bringing V’Ger to life. They actually reached out to the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to gain additional technical insights into the vessel including a potential launch date and to gather ideas about potential advancements in technology that might be included in future Voyager probes. At one point, Gene Roddenberry tried to get the mockup Voyager probe from JPL so that the production team could use it for the film, but JPL ultimately refused because they were worried about the mockup being damaged during transportation. Eventually, JPL provided Roddenberry’s team with blueprints for the Voyager probes themselves, which allowed them to build a true-to-life replica for the V’Ger core.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a unique piece of science fiction from a time when it was generally transitioning from the clean and optimistic aesthetic of 2001: A Space Odyssey into the gritty and nihilistic feelings of Aliens and Terminator. Personally, I yearn for the 70’s sci-fi aesthetic to return. The sense of human optimism and desire for discovery was what always made me gravitate toward Star Trek over other franchises. In my opinion, TMP stands as one of the most honest and true representations of the optimism that Star Trek wanted to bring to the world.

nightShifted Astronomy Joins Web Revolution

Posted on September 15, 2026

There is a quiet revolution happening across the internet. In the early days, which is where nightShifted Astronomy originally found its footing, the web was a wild and wonderful collection of personal sites, forums, and internet relay chat. These days, it’s an algorithmic hellscape dominated by a few major players with the sole purpose of monetizing and controlling every pixel that appears on your screen. This isn’t conspiracy or hyperbole… it’s truth. I am pleased to announce that nightShifted Astronomy is joining the web revival which aims to reclaim the internet from these massive corporations and to build a parallel information ecosystem where creativity and individual flair can thrive.

In rebuilding this website to its Web 1.5 style and trying to reclaim the original look and feel, I found some amazing relics from throughout the years that I wanted to share with you all!

A very early header from 2008 before I came up with the windmill design.

An alternate header used briefly in 2011.

A 2011 header showcasing something that certainly didn’t work out as much as I expected it to…

You can see the most-used and classic nA header as the featured image for this post. And, with that, there are some things you can expect from this site going forward.

A collection of personally curated space, astronomy, and sometimes science-fiction related blog posts.
No social media connections or sharing beyond a link to my YouTube projects.
No data harvesting or meta data collection.
No connection to Jetpack or other mass market data control systems.
Full support for RSS protocols so you can connect to nA through your favorite news reader.
Eventually this site will have full mobile support, but it will always be a desktop-first experience.

Thank you all for years of support both as the director of nightShifted Astronomy and my Campfire Chess projects. Let’s do this!

Planet Nine Might Not Be Space Woo

Posted on September 14, 2026

Before we get started with this article, let me make one thing clear.

PLUTO is the ninth planet. We’ll reference a ninth planet in this article, but it would effectively be the tenth planet if discovered. That’s it. We can continue now…

Scientists have worked for decades trying to prove the existence of a ninth planet beyond Neptune using the same methods that were used to discover our two outermost planets. Asteroid clustering in the Kuiper Belt has along led astronomers to theorize that there could be undiscovered gas giants similar to Neptune and Uranus out there. While these efforts are often lumped into conspiracy theories about Planet X and Nibiru, the search for other gaseous bodies in the solar system is very real and serious work.

According to a recent Space.com article, efforts by telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile could help unlock some of the most distant solar system mysteries and help us identify potential candidates for Planet Nine. By using these high powered observatories, researchers are hoping to find patterns in the clustering and unusual travel patterns of Neptune-crossing objects. However, it will most likely take direct observation of such a planet in order to convince a majority of people that it actually exists.

Until then, Planet Nine remains similar to Planet X as a phantom wandering across the heavens, waiting to be discovered.