News & Comment

The first planetarium projector was completed 100 years ago, providing the public with an unparalleled view of the night sky. The International Planetarium Society is marking this major anniversary with celebratory events across the globe.

JWST has revealed the most distant galaxies known, but photometric estimates of their redshifts are likely to be overly generous, owing to a statistical effect identified by Sir Arthur Eddington.

James Stone started developing Athena in the mid-2000s, building on several years’ work on numerical methods for compressible magnetohydrodynamics in shocks. A couple of incarnations later, AthenaK is ready to face the exascale computing future.

The two Moon landing attempts of the Luna 25 and the Chandrayaan-3 missions in close succession are symbolic of the renewed international push to go back to the Moon on a more consistent basis, which is shaping up to be one of the main space exploration narratives of our time.

The BOOTES global network of robotic telescopes is constantly watching the sky for astronomical transients, from its seven locations spread across both hemispheres.

A new regular column, Access Code, makes its debut in this issue. Access Code will focus on computational astrophysics, and in particular the models and programs that have supported astrophysical discoveries over the past few decades.

With the retirement of Ariane 5, Europe lost its only heavy-lift rocket — one that carried most of ESA’s fleet of large astronomy missions. The long-term future of independent access to space for Europe is not straightforward and can complicate the European space exploration roadmap.

XRISM will pick up where Hitomi left off, observing the energetic gas associated with galaxies.

Gary Ferland has been developing the photoionization code Cloudy for 45 years. The model has steadily been expanding in its coverage of parameter space, and focuses on the microphysics of irradiated environments.