The sky
The November 2026 sky: five planets, the Leonids and a supermoon
Five planets at once after midnight, Mars and Jupiter side by side next to Regulus, and the full calendar for the month.
Aster: a daily almanac of sky, science, games and tools
Daily almanacNº 1
Friday
October 30
Waning gibbous · 79 %Leonids · Nov 17
Today in the almanac: a guide to the November sky, 4 new games and a waning gibbous to look at tonight.
Latest
Space
Spacewalkers unfurl a new solar array on the Space Station
NASA’s Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency’s Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours and 11 minutes outside to install the seventh of eight new arrays, which adds about 8 kilowatts. With all eight, the station will go from 160 to roughly 215 kilowatts. Kutryk is the fifth Canadian to walk in space; the last array goes up on November 5.
Science
A new 7-meter hunting dinosaur is described in Patagonia
It’s called Rinconraptor pipoae, lived about 83 million years ago and was a megaraptorid, a group of meat-eaters with powerful arms. It was found near Rincón de los Sauces in Neuquén, Argentina, from ten tail vertebrae and parts of an arm and a leg. A CONICET team presented it in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
Technology
Mistral publishes its trillion-parameter AI model
The French company released the weights of Mistral Large 4, nicknamed “Le Chonk,” so anyone can download it and run it on their own hardware, under its own license. It has about a trillion parameters, of which it uses roughly 49 billion at a time, and the company says it excels at cybersecurity. It was trained in Europe on about 4,000 Nvidia chips.
Space
Betelgeuse turns egg-shaped, and a companion star may be to blame
Using the VLA and ALMA radio telescopes, a team saw the red supergiant’s atmosphere stretch into an egg shape at times. That fits the pull of a small star called Siwarha orbiting inside its outer atmosphere on a cycle of about 5.9 years. The authors note the evidence isn’t yet enough to confirm it. The study appeared in The Astronomical Journal.
Today's games
4 challenges that change every midnight. The same for everyone, so you can compare with friends.
Hidden constellation
Stars appear one by one. Guess the constellation in six tries or fewer.
6 triesPlay
Cosmic word
A five-letter space word. Gold tiles are in place; blue ones belong elsewhere.
6 triesPlay
Which planet am I?
Every clue makes it clearer: planets, moons and stars.
5 cluesPlay
Note of the day
Listen to a short melody and guess it note by note.
6 notesPlay
Science
An invisible layer covers the drawings in Chauvet Cave
Researchers from Sorbonne University and the CNRS shone ultraviolet light, without touching the walls, on drawings about 37,000 years old in this French cave. They found a transparent calcite film that may protect them like a natural varnish, though if it thickens it could also hide them. Some lines also seem to have been drawn with still-hot charcoal.
Science
Comets may not have brought life’s ingredients to Earth
A University of Cambridge team simulated 100,000 histories of comet impacts. In 54% of them, none delivered enough hydrogen cyanide, a key molecule for the chemistry that comes before life: small comets break apart in the air and impact heat destroys those molecules. Mars, with weaker gravity and thinner air, fared better.
Technology
Goodbye, leap second: the world’s clocks will stop adjusting
The General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting in Versailles, agreed to stop adding leap seconds to official time (UTC) starting in 2027. Since 1972, 27 had been added to keep pace with Earth, whose spin is slowly getting slower; the last one came in 2016. Now the gap can grow up to an hour before it’s corrected, which would take centuries.
Music
Logic Pro 13 arrives with an AI assistant that runs your projects
Apple announced the new version of its production app, free for existing owners. The assistant, in beta and English-only at first, can add tracks, open plugins or adjust levels when you ask. There’s also a sound browser that understands phrases like “heavy techno drums” and a splitter that breaks drums into six stems. It ships in November.
Workshop
Free tools that run in your browser. Your files never leave your device.
Studio
For musicians: tune up and keep time without installing anything.
Music
Moog launches amplifiers built for synthesizers
The Model 112, with a 12-inch speaker and 440 W, costs $799; the Model 210, with two 10-inch speakers and 550 W, costs $999. Both have a flat response so they don’t color the sound of synths and drum machines, plus a four-channel stereo mixer, Bluetooth and the option to link two in stereo. They’re on sale now.
Recommendation
Arcadópolis: a retro computer full of games that opens in your browser
If you miss afternoons in front of a desktop computer, with windows, icons and games tucked away in folders, Arcadópolis will feel like home.
Saturn
The gas giant famous for its rings of ice and rock, sixth planet from the Sun.
Moon
Earth's only natural satellite, which always shows us the same face.
Mars
The red planet: a cold desert world with the tallest volcano in the solar system.
Titan
Saturn's largest moon, with a thick atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane.