History
Cecilia Payne and the Composition of the Stars
In her 1925 Radcliffe doctoral thesis, Cecilia Payne demonstrated that the stars were made overwhelmingly of hydrogen. She was persuaded, against her own data, to soften the claim.
Dark sites editor
Yael Kahn
Yael Kahn lives in one of the darkest small towns in the Mediterranean and edits Last Light's Dark Sites section.
Beats
Published in Last Light
Night Skies
Zodiacal Light from a High-Desert Site in March
The faint cone of scattered interplanetary dust, observed across nine evenings from a turnout on the Mogollon Rim.
Observatories
Pic du Midi at Two Thousand Eight Hundred Meters: When the Tourists Sleep on the Summit
The Pic du Midi de Bigorre in the French Pyrenees runs an overnight tourist program inside a working observatory. A two-night stay during the May new moon.
Meteors
The Quadrantids on a January Morning
Yael Kahn watches the new year's first shower from the Negev plateau, and finds that its short, sharp peak is its great challenge and its small reward.
Dark Sites
Mitzpe Ramon: the makhtesh at three a.m.
On the edge of an erosion crater in the Negev sits one of the darkest small towns in the Mediterranean basin. A night at the Ramon Crater observatory with a school group from Beersheva.
Night Skies
A January Star Party in Single-Digit Cold
What twenty-one observers brought, wore, and saw on a clear night at fourteen below zero in northern Vermont.
Dark Sites
Westhavelland: the quietest Bortle 2 in Germany
Two hours west of Berlin, a wet flatland of polders and pumping stations has become the darkest accredited reserve in the country. A long Saturday in May, spent listening to cranes and watching the zodiacal light come up over a marsh.
Night Skies
Twelve Months of the Milky Way at Cherry Springs
A year of monthly visits to a small Pennsylvania state park, kept by an observer who logged each session in a black Moleskine.
Catalogues
A Messier Marathon Run From the McDonald Observatory Dark Site
On the night of March 27, 2026, fourteen observers from across Texas attempted to observe all 110 Messier objects in a single night from a high site in the Davis Mountains. Eleven succeeded.