Editor in chief
Beatriz Garcia is a historian of nineteenth-century southern-hemisphere astronomy. She founded Last Light in 2025.
Beats
Solar
Lyot's coronagraph, the instrument that first showed the corona without an eclipse, has a long descendant line. Beatriz Garcia on the original at Climax and the instruments it begot.
Dark Sites
In 1988 the Spanish parliament passed a national statute to protect the night sky over the Canary Islands. Nearly forty years later, the law remains the strictest sky-protection legislation in Europe. A visit to the Roque de los Muchachos.
Observatories
Late autumn in the Karoo brings the dry season's first cold nights to the SAAO summit. A May visit ahead of the heart of the southern winter observing season.
Catalogues
The Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg has been quietly assembling the world's working catalogue archive since 1972. A visit to the small staff that keeps it running.
Catalogues
Between 1911 and 1924, a small team at Harvard College Observatory classified the spectra of two hundred and twenty-five thousand stars. The catalogue still anchors stellar spectroscopy, and the work remains attributed, correctly, to Annie Jump Cannon.
Solar
Beatriz Garcia talks to three amateur eclipse chasers about what they have learned across decades of pursuit, and what the discipline costs and gives.
Catalogues
Caroline Furness kept her observing logs at Vassar's small dome between 1894 and 1936. The notebooks survive, and their calligraphy is a small lesson in what scientific record-keeping used to be.
History
Between 1898 and 1924, working from a small private observatory in Rosario, Argentina, Petronila Astengo recorded variable-star observations that ended up, mostly unattributed, in the Harvard archives.
Meteors
Beatriz Garcia surveys the small annual meteor showers that the casual observer overlooks, and argues that the lower rates are part of their attraction.
Dark Sites
The dune field of southern Colorado is one of the darkest accredited sites in the National Park system. A March night with a ranger, an amateur from Pueblo, and a wind that did not let up until 02:00.
Observatories
The Yerkes Future Foundation has run the historic Williams Bay observatory since 2020. Five years into the private stewardship, the world's largest refractor is observing again.
History
Through the 1970s, working at Kitt Peak and Lowell Observatories with a young instrument builder named Kent Ford, Vera Rubin measured the rotation of spiral galaxies and forced a question that had been avoidable for forty years.
Observatories
Above the Elqui Valley, the 0.9-meter and the 1.3-meter at Cerro Tololo still take queue-scheduled time for graduate students and amateur consortia. A May visit to the smaller domes.
Catalogues
John Louis Emil Dreyer compiled the NGC in 1888 from observations by three generations of the Herschel family and a small army of correspondents. What he left behind still anchors the field.
History
Between 1911 and 1924, working from glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, Annie Jump Cannon classified the spectra of roughly 350,000 stars. The system she settled on is still used.