Show Notes
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Viewing Highlights
Both morning & Evening skies are good for planets
Evening Skies: Mars is very low in NW skies setting about an hour after sunset. Mercury is above Mars also down in the Sun’s glare. Mercury and Mars are 1° apart on 13 November Saturn is high in the NE, the rings are almost edge on, but becoming more obvious over the next few years until they reach maximum tilt again in 2032. Uranus, high near Pleiades, binocular viewing.
Morning Skies: Jupiter (and its 4 Galilean moons) is always beautiful to look at, and can be seen for about 4 hours from about 2am till sunrise
Comets:
C/2023 R2 Swann – currently in Aquarius, fading, about Mag 5.6, high in evening skies, binoculars C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) – Magnitude 4, near horizon, so difficult.
Leonid Meteor shower will be quite poor this year, despite the absence of the moon ☹ Astrophotography Challenge
1. Take photos of the moon at apogee and at perigee using the same camera settings to measure the difference in the moon’s apparent size when it is at its closest and furthest from earth
2. Capture the Lunar X
Ian’s Tangent
Comet Atlas is being misrepresented by ‘conspiracy theorists’ on social media who claim, without a shred of evidence, that Comet Atlas is an “Interstellar Spacecraft reversing its thrust”
There is a long history of comets inducing panic and fear in humans. Sad.
Next Episode:
Our next episode, coming as soon as I finish the edit … features Dylan Grigg, a fabulous PhD from Perth in Western Australia. Dylan has been doing amazing work that impacts on the effectiveness of every radio telescope on the planet. He has revealed the presence of unintended radio frequencies leaking from the tens of thousands of low earth orbit satellites above us , and these leaking frequencies are threatening to drown out the very faintest of frequencies that tell us what was happening at the very dawn of time.
This is important work, and it was great to speak with Dylan. You’ll enjoy his stories!
See ya soon
More from Astronomy Astrophiz Podcast
What are gravitational waves, and could primordial black holes be dark matter? Astrophysicist Laura Byrne (University of Auckland) explains how the LISA space mission could detect them. Astrophiz podcast Episode 244.
Dr Ian 'Astroblog' Musgrave returns with your October 2026 Sky Guide for Australian skies, including Saturn at opposition (October 4), Mars crossing the Beehive Cluster (M44), the Orionid meteor shower, a daylight Lunar X on the 18th, and the occultation of Elnath (Beta Tauri) on October 29–30.
Is dark matter finally showing itself? In this episode of Astrophiz, Dr Sophia Gad-Nasr — particle cosmologist, science communicator, and creator of @AstropartiGirl — returns for her second appearance on the show (her first was Episode 90, back in 2019) to unpack the tantalising 2.6-sigma signal detected by the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment, buried deep underground in South Dakota.
Dr Ian 'Astroblog' Musgrave returns with your essential guide to the September night sky — Venus at its greatest brilliancy (mag -4.5), the Moon's occultation of Antares, and Mercury lining up with Venus and Spica at dusk.
Trevor Barry — the Outback Astronomer — is a world-renowned planetary imager whose backyard observatory in Broken Hill, NSW, produces scientific-grade Jupiter and Saturn data used by NASA. In this episode of Astrophiz, host Brendan O'Brien travels to the outback to sit down with Trevor at his custom-built observatory.