Stargazing & Astronomy News Podcasts

Look Up!, from the astronomers of the Royal Observatory Greenwich, is practical from the start. In Look Up! April 2026 the hosts tell you to switch your star app to red night-vision mode. They then place Venus about 4 degrees south of the Pleiades on the 19th, "about the width of three fingers." Star Diary, from the makers of BBC Sky at Night Magazine, enjoys the fine print. In The Evening Star is back the presenters point out that the Lyrids' radiant now sits in Hercules, because the IAU redrew the constellation boundaries. They then half-seriously propose a petition to move it back.

Star Trails: A Weekly Astronomy Podcast takes things more slowly. Night of the Hunter: A Deep Dive into Orion leads you on a star hop from the belt to Aldebaran and the Pleiades, and says: "You didn't need a chart, and you didn't need an app." Manx Sky at Night has the easy warmth of local radio, with Howard Parkin and Judith Ley talking about the skies over the Isle of Man. In Essential information for stargazing during December, and stories from outer space -with Astronomer Howard Parkin, Parkin explains why Jupiter appears to move backwards, and dismisses astrological worry about it: "It's a line of sight effect, just like a racing car going around a racing track."

SpaceTime with Stuart Gary is the densest of the news shows. Unveiling 11,000 New Asteroids and Earth's Local Origins reports a batch of discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre, and gives the 8.4-metre mirror and 3.2-gigapixel figures. The same episode spends a long stretch on Virgin Galactic's business plans, so expect spaceflight commerce alongside the astronomy. Mission stories like that lead naturally to the Space Exploration & Missions page.

Pythagorean Astronomy is an extended monthly roundup from Rhys Phillips's radio show Pythagoras' Trousers. Its 2019 back catalogue is still a useful lesson in caution. In Habitable zones, Lunar landers and Interstellar interlopers, the possible water vapour on K2-18b is weighed carefully, and the planet is judged "very far from what you might consider you know a second Earth." Star Diary's The mystery of comet 3I/ATLAS is similarly careful. A guest who observed the comet with the Very Large Telescope explains why its composition and trajectory "seem to indicate" that it formed around an older star. Readers drawn to comets and habitable worlds should continue to the Planetary Science & Astrobiology page.

Space Weather Woman Forecasts and News applies the forecasting habit to the Sun. Earth Gets a 1,2,3-Punch and the X-Flare Factor is Back | Solar Storm Forecast 15 October 2025 times successive solar storms and tells drone pilots to recalibrate their magnetometers often.

Walkabout the Galaxy is four presenters calling themselves the Astro Quarks. In one episode, they argue about how to pronounce "kilometer" before they get to the science. When they reach a possible black hole below one solar mass in A Whisper of a Hint of Primordial Black Holes plus Earth BLOBs, they flag the detection as "on the hairy edge" between real signal and noise. The Cosmology & Astrophysics page goes further into that territory.

Observers Notebook, from the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, stays close to the telescope. In The Observers Notebook - Seeing and Transparancy with Dr. D, the guest recalls stars that looked perfectly steady while the view through the telescope was terrible: the turbulence was so fast it blurred into stillness. He also recommends an aperture mask for Dobsonian telescopes. The Actual Astronomy Podcast, hosted by Chris and Shane, finds the obsession in its listeners. In #529 - A Listener Builds His Dream Observatory, the guest spray-painted the observatory's footprint on the ground and sat there drinking coffee, imagining the building.

For equipment, Space Junk's Complete Telescope Systems vs Assembling From Components - Which is Better? argues that shaky mounts are what send beginners' telescopes into the closet. Science in Astrophotography explains in My workflow to photograph deep sky objects why combining frames of unequal exposure can worsen the final image's noise.

Big Impact Astronomy widens the frame to who gets to look up at all. Astronomy for STEM Education in Libya with Atiyah Alhasadi describes telescopes shipped by sea, a trip of three or four months. For the wider field, return to the Astronomy guide or the Science category guide.