And why 2026 could be a big year for spotting auroras. Northern lights shine in the night sky over the landscape in northeastern Germany on January 19, 2026. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Still, patient stargazers will be rewarded with a memorable planetary alignment. And for those readers joining us from the Southern Hemisphere, there's also the Alpha Centaurids meteor shower to look forward to.

The highlight of the year, the Geminids are the most active and colorful meteor shower, offering the chance to see hundreds of shooting stars every hour when they peak in mid-December. If you want to get into stargazing in 2025, there's still a chance to catch some of the best meteor showers of the year. Also known as shooting stars, meteors happen when Earth's orbital path crosses a path of debris left by a comet and that material burns up in the Earth's atmosphere. Watching a meteor shower is one of the most accessible ways to engage with the night sky. The next shower are the Geminids, a busy and bright shower that peaks in mid-December, offering the chance to see hundreds of shooting stars each hour.

Winter officially arrives on Sunday, December 21. A view of the Geminid meteor shower and stargazing at the Tunnel View of Yosemite National Park on December 14, 2023. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As one might expect from a month full of long, dark nights, December is a highlight for those with a penchant for looking to the stars . This year, the stargazing on offer promises to be particularly good.

Donald Trump wants Washington Commanders to name $3.7billion stadium after him The ugly gossip about Marjorie Taylor Greene swirling in DC... no wonder she's giving this'nothing to see here' performance of a lifetime: KENNEDY Tupac's family hid his final secret for decades. Donald Trump's new city-destroying nuclear missile'is spotted for the first time' as planespotter photographs it on hush-hush test flight The truth about Aaron Rodgers's secret'wife': Family lift the lid on the NFL's biggest mystery... and finally put to bed those swirling rumors Singer Grande shows off her 40 hand'prison' tattoos at Wicked: For Good premiere in Paris Insiders blow lid on top secret actor'blacklist' at Paramount that's tearing Hollywood apart and start naming names White House space sabotage plot EXPOSED: The truth behind the NASA war that tore Trump's inner circle in two Wild image shows how Simone Biles would look next to Olivier Rioux... after he made his college basketball debut Southern city morphs into New York's'tiny twin' as Big Apple residents flock there in droves to escape woke mayor Succession star Sarah Snook's new thriller is the best show of the year - its brings every parent's worst nightmare to life in spectacular fashion and I binged all eight episodes in one sitting Fears as Days of Our Lives is beset by string of tragedies... leaving producers desperately scrambling to save iconic show Soap icon turned ordained minister who flirted with Andy Warhol steps out in LA... can you guess who? She was an award-winning Teacher of the Year. Jeremy Renner's film partner claims he sent her explicit photos and videos to woo her then threatened the unthinkable when they fell out MORE: Scientists discover extraterrestrial relics in the first samples from moon's mysterious far side Two mysterious flashes have been spotted on the moon's surface, sparking a debate over what just struck our nearest neighbor in the solar system. Astronomer Daichi Fujii, curator of the Hiratsuka City Museum in Japan, captured the first of these bright flashes on October 30, revealing a large round dot briefly illuminating the moon's surface before disappearing.

This month's full moon will come within about 222,000 miles of Earth. The supermoon rises from the sea in Molfetta, Italy, on October 7, 2025. It was the first of three consecutive supermoons in 2025. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As the year's penultimate month kicks off, the year's brightest supermoon is almost here.

Three meteor showers will peak this month. This delightfully detailed false color image of Saturn is a combination of three images taken in January 1998 by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows the ringed planet in reflected infrared light. Different colors indicated varying heights and compositions of cloud layers generally thought to consist of ammonia ice crystals. The eye-catching rings cast a shadow on Saturn's upper hemisphere, while the bright stripe seen within the left portion of the shadow is infrared sunlight streaming through the large gap in the rings known as the Cassini Division. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) was only discovered in January 2025. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Stargazers will be happy to know that October will see the cosmos compensating for a couple of relatively lean months.There will be a whole bunch of celestial bodies to see over the next month, including the year's largest and brightest full moon, the arrival of a brand new comet, two meteor showers and a good chance to see our solar system's favorite big fella in all his glory. October's full moon finds our closest celestial companion at its perigee, i.e. the point at which it's closest to the Earth. This means that this month's full moon will be [drum roll] a supermoon!

Planetary scientists can now predict when the aurora will shine over our cosmic neighbor. An artist's impression of how the aurora might appear in the sky above the Perseverance rover. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Just like Earth, our cosmic neighbor Mars sometimes has auroras dance across its night sky. In March 2024, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover imaged visible-light auroras for the first time during a major solar flare and coronal mass ejection.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As any diligent stargazer knows, mid-summer means one thing: the Perseids! This meteor shower hits its peak on August 12 this year, and while that date is inconveniently close to that of this month's full moon, there should still be plenty of meteors on show for those who choose their time and location with care. As another long summer day has finally receded into another summer night, look east. If the sky is clear, you might well spy the Summer Triangle.

Accurate identification of meteoroid streams is central to understanding their origins and evolution. However, overlapping clusters and background noise hinder classification, an issue amplified for missions such as ESA's LUMIO that rely on meteor shower observations to infer lunar meteoroid impact parameters. This study evaluates the performance of the Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN) algorithm for unsupervised meteoroid stream identification, comparing its outcomes with the established Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) look-up table method. We analyze the CAMS Meteoroid Orbit Database v3.0 using three feature vectors: LUTAB (CAMS geocentric parameters), ORBIT (heliocentric orbital elements), and GEO (adapted geocentric parameters). HDBSCAN is applied with varying minimum cluster sizes and two cluster selection methods (eom and leaf). To align HDBSCAN clusters with CAMS classifications, the Hungarian algorithm determines the optimal mapping. Clustering performance is assessed via the Silhouette score, Normalized Mutual Information, and F1 score, with Principal Component Analysis further supporting the analysis. With the GEO vector, HDBSCAN confirms 39 meteoroid streams, 21 strongly aligning with CAMS. The ORBIT vector identifies 30 streams, 13 with high matching scores. Less active showers pose identification challenges. The eom method consistently yields superior performance and agreement with CAMS. Although HDBSCAN requires careful selection of the minimum cluster size, it delivers robust, internally consistent clusters and outperforms the look-up table method in statistical coherence. These results underscore HDBSCAN's potential as a mathematically consistent alternative for meteoroid stream identification, although further validation is needed to assess physical validity.