Image (Credit): “The Dementors of Cepheus,” by Julien De Winter, Landon Boehm, and Brian Diaz. (Astronomy Magazine)
This week’s image is the winning entry from Astronomy magazine’s 2026 Astrophotography Contest. The winning image is titled “The Dementors of Cepheus,” captured by Julien De Winter, Landon Boehm, and Brian Diaz. It was one of about 1,400 entries in the contest.
The magazine defines the image in this way:
A pair of shadowy, wraithlike figures weave their way through a grand tapestry of stellar life and death in our grand-prize-winning image. The imagers refer to them as the “Dementors of Cepheus” — a reference to the wardens of the prison Azkaban in the Harry Potter series. Here, they guard not convicts, but a corpse: The filaments of gas in the center of the frame are the remnants of a supernova, cataloged as SNR G110.3+11.3, that blew apart a massive star.
The supernova is approximately 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus.
You can read more about this winning image as well as the winners in other categories at the magazine’s gallery site.
It would be great if NASA had a number of rocket suppliers run by boring corporate types who competently provided a service and then quietly went home to their families each night. But we don’t. NASA as well as the Department of Defense have become more and more reliant on one erratic man and one company for most of its rocket needs. This is a problem.
Elon Musk does not go home each night to relax with a drink or attend charitable events. No, he spends his time interfering in foreign affairs, be it Ukraine or England, while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on US elections. Even more troublesome, he joined the current administration to systematically destroy parts of the government based on incomplete, inaccurate or fabricated data. This is a problem.
So with the recent election and the coming change in Congress, what can we expect regarding Mr. Musk and SpaceX?
The newspapers are full of potential problems that were foreseeable yet ignored or hidden by the White House.
SpaceX Starlink: The new Congress is likely to open investigations on Mr. Musk’s involvement in the degradation of Starlink services shortly after President Trump announced plans to import Russian fuel while also telling Ukraine to cease the destruction of energy facilities in Russia – a country that continues to randomly murder Ukranian civilians.
As Silicon Valley’s elected members in Congress, we represent hundreds of innovation economy employers and workers whose livelihoods depend on the credibility of American technology abroad..Politically motivated service interruptions or erratic throttling will undermine reputations developed through decades of work that Americans have led to support our allies and customers throughout the world.
An October article in TheEconomist made it clear that Europe needed to move away from Starlink and Mr. Musk a well, stating:
Recent days have made clear the folly of relying too much for your national security on a capricious private citizen named Elon Musk.
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): The destruction of various government offices and services by DOGE, particularly the US Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the potential misuse of private government data, will also be the subject of congressional investigations. Government audits have already determined DOGE activities were poorly documented and its findings overstated.
The DOGE chickens are coming home to roost. Elon Musk waved a chainsaw on stage and laughed while firing public servants and gutting the services Americans rely on. Then he lied to the American people about the savings. He must answer for it under oath.
SpaceX Rockets: Many on the Hill will question the risks associated with the government’s reliance on a single rocket company run by an individual with questionable ties to Russia’s President Putin. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich has also called for the nationalization of SpaceX – an unlikely event, but an indication of the current mood among some Democrats.
Greater scrutiny of SpaceX’s government contracts were called for In the same letter noted above, with the Democratic Congressmen stated:
We will ensure that the 120th Congress will closely scrutinize federal funding awarded to Mr. Musk’s businesses, including whether these companies meet their contractual obligations, and whether adequate safeguards exist against political interference, arbitrary service restrictions, and misuse of federal resources.
Mr. Musk also shot himself in the foot by spending over $45 million on the recent Texas US Senate race only to see his candidate lose, in part because of the backlash against Musk’s excessive involvement. This lost race, as well as the election of a Democratic governor, is not good news for Texas-based SpaceX.
None of this will go away under the new Congress, and if the past is any guide, Mr. Musk’s attempts to try to make it go away will only make it worse for him and for the rest of us.
Image (Credit): CHAPEA Mission 2 crew members (from left to right) Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery, and James Spicer after entering the habitat in October 2025. (NASA)
You are probably familiar with the names Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen from the Artemis II mission, but how about the names Elder, Ellis, Montgomery, and Spicer. It is not a law firm, but rather the four crew members who just completed 378 days as part of NASA’s simulated Mars mission.
Their full names and titles are:
Ross Elder, mission commander;
Ellen Ellis, medical officer;
Matthew Montgomery, science officer; and
James Spicer, flight engineer.
The simulated Mars mission, called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), took place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The four-member crew lived in a 1,700 square foot habitat for more than a year conducting scientific research and operational tasks. It is the second such mission to test out the idea of humans living in isolation on the Moon and Mars.
Michael Stenger, chief scientist for NASA’s Human Research Program, had this to say about the role of the latest CHAPEA mission:
This mission has been incredibly valuable in starting to teach us how to understand requirements for year-long missions, including medical and psychological care, via communication delays…When combining this Mars-realistic mission analog with a suite of physiological, psychological, and performance measures in a rigorously controlled environment, we’ll be able to translate the knowledge from these experiences to Moon Base and beyond.
While you might expect Mr. Musk to be financing such work given all of his talk about going to Mars (rather than blowing hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns), the funding and hard work is being done by NASA alone.
Congrats to the four crew members for their hard work!
Image (Credit): The CHAPEA 1,700-square-foot habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. (NASA)
A meteorite found in 2022 in the Sahara in Mali formed in the Martian crust at least 4.1 billion years ago, according to scientists, making the reddish igneous rock perhaps the oldest of the 435 meteorites from Mars known on Earth. The researchers said the composition of the meteorite, called Teghaza 001, is providing insight into the environment early in the history of Earth’s planetary neighbor, with fresh evidence of liquid water on the surface that bolsters the notion that primordial Mars may have been conducive to microbial life.
Massive galaxies like the Milky Way have a retinue of smaller, dim satellites on their outskirts. They’re hard to detect, and while astronomers have found about 65 of the Milky Way’s dwarf satellite galaxies, and about 40 globular clusters in its halo, they suspect there are many dwarf satellites and globular clusters yet to be found. Now the Vera Rubin Observatory has found two more. The Milky Way’s satellites are either small dim galaxies or globular clusters, and both are part of the assembly history of the Milky Way through mergers. These two detections by the Rubin, found in its Early Data Preview 2 (EDP2) released in July 2026, are almost certainly the beginning of many more discoveries of Milky Way satellites by the powerful observatory. One is a most likely a dim dwarf galaxy named Aquarius IV, and one is a globular cluster named Rubin-GC1.
China plans to land Chinese astronauts on the Moon before 2030, with a crew of three, two of whom are expected to set foot on the lunar surface, the Global Times learned from the 7th Human Space Symposium, held in Beijing on Saturday. The country’s first manned lunar mission will employ a lunar-orbit rendezvous and docking profile, Wang Xiang, deputy chief designer of China’s manned space program and chief designer of the lunar exploration program, said at the symposium. The crew for China’s first crewed lunar exploration mission is planned to consist of three taikonauts, two of whom will land on the lunar surface, Wang added.
