Milky Way Kiwi

21/07/2025

The next chapter in; does Betelgeuse have a companion was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters this week with the first direct image evidence of a companion. They used a technique similar to the lucky imaging technique used by astrophotographers to get a view of the 6 magnitudes dimmer star. Very cool! Off to read the full paper now!

Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and the closest red supergiant to Earth. It has an enormous volume, spanning a radius around 700 times that of the sun. Despite only being ten million years old, which is considered young by astronomy standards, it's late in its life.

15/07/2025

WIKI-WIN for New Zealand’s Dark Skies!
We’re thrilled to share that Graeme Murray, the visionary behind New Zealand’s dark sky movement and co-founder of Earth & Sky (now the Dark Sky Project), has officially been recognised with his own Wikipedia page!
His dedication to protecting our night skies and pioneering astro-tourism in Lake Tekapo helped put Aotearoa on the world stargazing map.

Read more about his journey and legacy here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Murray_(entrepreneur)

Ngā mihi nui, Graeme — and to all those working to keep our skies dark and full of stars.

Graeme Douglas Murray MNZM JP is a New Zealand tourism entrepreneur known for his role in the establishment of the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve.

04/07/2025

The deadline for applications for the 2025 Prime Minister’s Space Prizes has been extended to 4 September. Apply now!

These awards were announced by the Government in 2024 to recognise the talented people working in New Zealand’s space and advanced aviation sectors, and to inspire young people.

The Society manages the process to select winners on behalf of the Government.

Space Prize for Professional Excellence – for outstanding professional achievements and contributions in a space-related field ($100,000).

Space Prize for Student Endeavour – for a student in Year 12 or 13 for a science, technology, or engineering project related to space or advanced aviation ($50,000).

Find out more about the prizes and apply here https://pmspaceprizes.org.

03/07/2025

It’s Aphelion Day tomorrow! That’s when we are further from the Sun than at any other time during the year. The exact time is at 7:54am tomorrow morning (4 July) and we will be 152,087,738km from the Sun. That’s 4,984,052km further away than we were on 5 January, when we were at perihelion. That info is from timeanddate.com and the picture below is of the Sun a few days ago using Slooh’s solar telescope in the Canary Islands.

25/06/2025

With this link you can explore the imagery from the Vera Rubin Observatory.

20/06/2025

This is an interesting paper on the search for planet nine published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia using the far infrared AKARI survey. They narrow it down to two candidates for planet nine.

A far-infrared search for planet nine using AKARI all-sky survey - Volume 42

05/06/2025

ISpace is about to land their Resilience spacecraft on the Moon, here’s a link to the live stream.

For our Japanese language stream, please access below link:日本語配信は下記のURLをご覧ください：https://youtube.com/live/B682YoxGF0w

03/06/2025

NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope is the world biggest instrument dedicated to looking at the Sun, we visited the site last year and it’s massive. It’s located on Haleakala on Maui and has an enormous 4m mirror. This article covers some fascinating magnetic structures picked up from analysis of the telescope’s images and the most detailed image of the Sun’s surface to date.

A team of solar physicists has released a new study shedding light on the fine-scale structure of the sun's surface. Using the unparalleled power of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the National Solar Observatory (NSO) on Maui, scientists have observed, for the first time....

02/06/2025

Congratulations to Alan and Pam. Fantastic recognition of the their monumental and ongoing contribution to astronomy in New Zealand.

Guardians against the galaxy: Tekapo couple honoured for planetary defence contributions

A Tekapo couple who have spent the past 50 years helping to track asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth have been jointly awarded the New Zealand Order of Merit.

30/05/2025

This video is of the meteors picked up by the Fireballs Aotearoa network over the last month. The cameras only record at night and when it’s not cloudy so it’s a fraction of what is actually bombarding us from space. This is data for the last month displayed on Google Earth.

29/05/2025

This stunningly cool image was released on the 27th from the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s of the galaxy cluster Abell S1063, which is about 4.5 billion light years away in the constellation Grus (just starting to reappear in the evening sky). The streaks are distant galaxies being gravitationally lensed by the huge cluster. 120 hours of JSWT time was used for this image making it the deepest image so far from that amazing space telescope. (Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, H. Atek, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) Acknowledgement: R. Endsley)

21/05/2025

Dr Michelle Thaller has 28 years of experience at NASA, working most recently at NASA’s largest base, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington DC. She was a scientist in NASA’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which has launched missions to every planet in our solar system, including the V...