Earth’s super telescopes

We had been driving for most of the day across the rugged terrain of the Atacama to reach our wild camp spot for the night. Shades of rusty orange coated the landscape. Volcanoes loomed among the jagg

Astronomers love a challenge. They place their observatories on the highest mountains, in the driest deserts, on the coldest ice shelves, beneath the deepest oceans, in orbit around Earth and the Sun,

In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britai

The new Sightron Infini D50 set caught our eye as a budget, long-focal-ratio achromat in a market dominated by modern, short and fast refractors. Could this grab-and-go kit deliver high-contrast views

Ten years ago, on 14 September 2015, a new window on the Universe was opened, giving us a novel way of studying exotic, high-energy objects such as black holes and neutron stars: the first direct dete

This October marks 50 years since a heavily shielded spacecraft, the Soviet Union’s Venera 9, parachuted into the atmosphere of Venus. Then, having landed, it did something extraordinary: it beamed ba