Stargazing News: August 2026 Planets, Blaze Star Watch

August’s headline eclipse and Perseids are still a week or so away, but the past fortnight gave UK observers something to do right now, plus two space stories worth a read. Here is what is fresh since our last roundup, from the Moon signposting the morning planets to a nova that still refuses to blow.

The Moon points you to Saturn and the morning planets

On the mornings of 3 and 4 August the waning gibbous Moon sits close to Saturn low in the south, which NASA’s What’s Up for August flags as the easiest way to find the ringed planet before dawn. It matters because it is a free signpost to the planet parade building towards 12 August: over the following mornings the Moon thins to a crescent and slides down past Mars and Mercury lower in the east. Look 45 to 60 minutes before sunrise with a clear, low horizon. Saturn is an easy naked-eye point of light, while the fainter members reward a telescope, and our best telescope for planets guide covers what actually helps at low altitude.

The Blaze Star still has not erupted, so learn Corona Borealis now

T Coronae Borealis, the recurrent nova known as the Blaze Star, was widely tipped to erupt around late June, and that window has passed with the star still sitting quietly at telescope-only brightness, as EarthSky explains. It is worth caring about because when it does go, and it is roughly 80 years on from its last outburst in 1946, it should brighten to about magnitude 2 within hours, bright enough to see with the naked eye, but only for a few nights. The trick is to know the pattern in advance: find the small semicircle of Corona Borealis high in the UK evening sky, between the bright stars Arcturus and Vega, so an unfamiliar new star there jumps out at you. Our how to start stargazing guide walks through finding the summer constellations, and a decent pair of binoculars will pick up the nova first.

NASA’s Psyche sends back a time-lapse of its Mars flyby

NASA has released images and a short time-lapse video from the Psyche spacecraft’s Mars flyby, when the probe swung about 2,860 miles above the surface on 15 May to borrow the planet’s gravity, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For a hobbyist it is a neat look at what practice imaging looks like on a real mission: Psyche captured windblown craters and the south polar cap, and even picked out the tiny moons Phobos and Deimos as a test of its cameras. The spacecraft is the first sent to a world thought to be made largely of metal, asteroid 16 Psyche out in the main belt, and it is due to arrive in the summer of 2029.

Webb uncovers a hidden giant planet at Beta Pictoris

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have reported a new gas giant, Beta Pictoris d, in one of the most closely studied young star systems, about 63 light years away, NASA says. What makes it striking is the method: Webb did not photograph the planet, it detected the chemical fingerprint of its atmosphere, spotting carbon monoxide where no object had been seen, then confirming a world at least twice the mass of Jupiter. It is the third giant now known in the Beta Pictoris system. The star itself sits too far south to see from the UK, but the find shows how far telescopes have moved beyond simply gathering light, the trade-off we explain in our telescope aperture guide.