Every Cosmic Herald story on European Southern Observatory — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage from January 2025's Blue Ghost/Hakuto-R launch slammed into the Moon's far side near Einstein crater on August 5, 2026, and ESO's VLT caught sodium and lithium flashing in the debris plume.
Read the story →A NASA/JPL-led study in Nature Astronomy has reclassified near-Earth object 1998 SH2 as an active comet — now P/1998 SH2 — after tiny outgassing-driven accelerations and a faint tail gave it away during a 2025 close pass.
Astronomers pulled a third giant planet, Beta Pictoris d, out of 11 years of VLT data and confirmed it with JWST — at ~2.4 Jupiter masses and 100x fainter than Beta Pic b, it's the faintest planet ever directly imaged from the ground.
The gap between what professional astronomers can photograph and what a person with a consumer camera can photograph has collapsed in a decade. Modern sensors, computational processing, and stacking software have put Milky Way portraits and even nebula detail within reach of anyone with patience and a clear night. Here's what the technology.
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