The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) partnership has turned down Spain’s bid to plant the long-stalled giant on La Palma, ending a last-ditch attempt to move the project from Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. After more than a decade of protests and permitting delays on the preferred Hawaiian summit, Spain put a package of up to €1 billion on the table; roughly €400 million from its technology agency plus loans involving the European Investment Bank and Spain’s official credit institute; if the consortium would commit to the Canary Islands site. The TMT International Observatory replied that its members (California, Caltech, Canada, India, and Japan) could not reach the consensus needed to accept the offer. The letter praised Spain’s “extraordinary” commitment and the scientific quality of the Roque, but construction there will not start in the near term.
For backyard observers, the news is a reminder of how hard it has become to finish the next generation of 30-meter-class telescopes. TMT was meant to give the Northern Hemisphere a counterpart to the southern giants now rising in Chile, opening deeper views of exoplanets, the first galaxies, and the faint outer solar system. La Palma already hosts the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias and a dense cluster of other instruments under some of Europe’s darkest, steadiest skies; adding TMT would have made the island a true northern flagship. Instead, the project remains tied to Mauna Kea, where a new management authority is still working through community and legal issues, and some insiders now openly wonder whether TMT will be built at all. The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias says it will keep developing the Roque and look for other large facilities.
For us amateurs who follow big-telescope news the way others follow sports, the story is bittersweet: another chapter closed, the universe still waiting for that 30-meter mirror to open.
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.
Imagine my suprise when I learned that this January was a remarkable anniversary for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER)…
Space exploration in the early 2000s went through something of a minor renaissance with the launch of the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity along with the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan. January 2026 marks 22 years since the MERs landed at two separate equatorial locations on Mars. Spirit arrived at Gusev crater on January 4, 2004 while Opportunity landed in Eagle crater on January 25, 2004.
This was the first time since the Mars PathFinder station with its Sojourner rover had beamed back photos of the red planet that humanity was poised to return to our nearest planetary neighbor. We came in search of answers to its multitude of mysteries and in hopes of gaining further understanding of our own world. We were a couple of years removed from September 11th and the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, so there was a lot of public attention focused on the space program. It wasn’t just space nerds like me watching to see what tricks NASA was going to perform next. The MER program promised to be something special and the entire world was watching.
What wasn’t expected was how incredibly special the whole project would be.
Back to the Red Planet
I remember following various NASA feeds and watching news updates as Spirit approached Mars. This was the first time that the balloon-style airbag system had been used to put a rover on another planet. In fact, most of the technology associated with this mission was brand new, so everything was a new experience. I was elated as the telemetry data arrived at mission control and news began circulating that the rover had successfully landed. It would take some time for the airbags to deflate in a way that would ensure the landing platform was positioned appropriately on the plnaet surface, but once that was done, Spirit was free to begin exploring its new home.
It didn’t take long for Spirit and Opportunity to beam back their first high-definition photos of the red planet. This was the first time that real space exploration had truly entered into the high-tech digital age. Gone were the days of grainy, small images like we’d seen with Sojourner. And the images did not disappoint. Mars was as beautiful as it was imagined in science fiction with rolling hills, jagged cliffs, dust devils, and many other surprises.
Spirit’s Silence
There was a moment of panic during the early days of the mission, however. This was a major headline around the world because of the intense pressure on NASA to perform well with its projects in a post-Columbia world. For some unknown reason at the time, the Spirit rover entered into a fault protection mode, which is designed to secure the rover when a major onboard problem occurs. Instead of the steady stream of images received on Earth for the prior 18 days, instead, a basic communication tone was received, which alerted ground personnel to the critical failure.
Eventually the problem was identified as a software issue that was easily repaired by the control team, but it was certainly an anxiety producing moment. There were many of us nerds on the ground watching from afar as our hopes of exploring Mars were in jeopardy. But instead of a failed mission, we got to see a side of NASA that many of us felt was a relic of the past. The ground team identified the problem and was able to get Spirit working once again.
An Unexpected Journey
Once the communication problem from Spirit was solved, the MERs performed nearly flawlessly on Mars for the next several years! What was supposed to be a 90-day mission lasted almost fifty-five times longer than originally intended. During that time we got to see the first views of Earth from the surface of another world. We learned that Mars has regular dust devils, whose winds regularly cleaned off the MER solar panels and greatly extended their mission length. This all went on until around 2010 when Spirit began to fail mechanically. It started with the wheels and eventually the memory systems started failing. By March of 2010, the batteries on Spirit were so low that the rover entered into emergency protection mode and was no longer capable of responding to commands.
On the other side of the planet, Opportunity continued to explore Mars for another eight years before it was caught up in a massive dust storm that ultimately doomed the rover. Attempts were made by NASA to communicate with it until early 2019 before leadership decided that the mission had reached its completion.
I am sad to say that I stopped following the rover missions a few years after they landed on Mars. In fact, life became so hectic that my most distinctive memories of Spirit and Opportunity after 2006 are learning of their demise. The MERs are perhaps one of the most incredibly successful planetary exploration missions in the last 25 years. No other mission has provided us with the insight into an alien world like they did. And no other mission has exceeded its original projected lifespan like they did. Even the Perseverence and Curiosity rovers that followed them were unable to capture the magic of those early days of rover exploration on Mars. Any craft that lands on Mars without humans has immense shoes to fill. The red planet still has countless secrets to be unlocked and I hope that one day we’ll see something land on Mars that inspires the next generation of interplanetary scientists.
A team of astronomers has, for the first time, “weighed” dark matter haloes surrounding actively feeding supermassive black holes in the bright hearts of ancient galaxies.
These black hole-powered hearts, or quasars, are often brighter than the combined light of every star in the galaxies around them. These super luminous central regions are “fired up” when supermassive black holes, which can have masses billions of times that of the sun, start greedily feeding on surrounding matter.
Personally, I’ve always been a dark matter skeptic. There’s so much indirect evidence for its existence, but I’ve never seen anything presented that has 100% convinced me it exists. I view it much like scientists used to believe in the aether. I wonder if one day we’ll learn that our calculations were simply wrong and that we didn’t need to fill the universe with invisible “dark matter” to make it work.
And according to a new study, scientists suggest dark matter haloes around such active galaxies could help funnel matter toward the central black hole, acting as a cosmic delivery service helping feed the titans.
Still, it’s an interesting finding, for sure! Imagine the power flowing through these galaxies pushing that matter into their central supermassive black holes! With our ever-growing observation power, it’s only a matter (no pun intended) of time before we’ll be seeing up-close and personal images of these devouring beasts!
Welcome to nightShifted Astronomy, which also doubles as my personal home page. My name is Commander Exorcist and I’ve been creating web content in one form or another since 1995. In 2005 I started blogging about astronomy and science-related topics on my website nightShifted Astronomy. That project lasted until 2014 when I closed it to focus on a chess website. That site continues to this day, but I have decided to resurrect nightShifted Astronomy here on my home domain and combine it with my internet content creation projects.
Please check back regularly for updates on my progress and be sure to click the links to the left to check out my many different projects across social media related to gaming and art content.
See you out there!
UPDATE (SEPTEMBER 2026): Campfire Chess was retired in 2024 and moved to a permanent archive home here at Chess.WesleySurber.com. nightShifted Astronomy re-opened officially in 2022 but sat dormant for many years. I am working to restore it to its former glory in the Year of Our Lord 2026.
