Development blog · October 23, 2026

Through the eyepiece

The telescope has arrived: choose from what is up in your sky right now, and it finds it and follows it across the sky. And you can now walk the Earth, and swim its seas, at your own eye level.

Last time we promised a telescope. It is here, and it works the way a modern go-to telescope does: you pick something to see, and it turns to it, centers it and keeps it there as the Earth turns beneath the stars.

What is up tonight

There are 183 things ready to look at: the Moon and the planets, 30 of the brightest and best-known stars and double stars, 71 star clusters, 31 nebulae and 43 galaxies. The list shows what is actually in your sky from where you stand at that moment. Everything else is still there, with the reason you cannot see it yet and when you can: below the horizon, up only in daylight, lost in the Sun’s glare, or hidden behind the mountain in front of you.

Choose one and the telescope does the rest. It picks the telescope, eyepiece and Barlow lens that show it best, from a small 80 mm refractor for wide star fields to a 14-inch telescope for the planets and the faint galaxies, and you can change them yourself at any time. A short guide tells you what you are looking at, how far away it is and when it will be highest tonight.

The telescope screen: a list of stars, planets and clusters on the left with their heights in the sky, Saturn with its rings in the middle, and a guide to Saturn on the right. — Saturn chosen from the list of what is up over the Great Smoky Mountains on an October evening, with the telescope set up for it and the guide beside it. In-development capture, October 2026.

When something cannot be seen from where you are, the guide finds the next good time: the next dark night when it climbs well up in your sky. If it never rises high enough from your part of the world, it suggests one of the great observing sites where it does, from Mauna Kea in Hawaii to Mount John in New Zealand. One button takes you there, at that moment, with the telescope already turning toward it.

The Moon and planets

The Moon shows its real face: its dark seas, its bright rays and its craters, lit from the Sun’s true direction. Its phase is always right, and along the line between day and night the shadows bring out its mountains and crater walls. It is the same Moon you see in the sky above you, only closer.

A waxing gibbous Moon filling the view, its gray seas and bright craters sharp, with a crater-lined edge where its day meets its night. — The waxing gibbous Moon through an 80 mm refractor from Clingmans Dome, on the evening of October 21, 2026. In-development capture, October 2026.

The planets are here too, each at its true size, phase and brightness for the moment, with Saturn’s rings tilted toward us exactly as they are that night. Uranus is a small blue-green disc and Neptune a smaller blue one, as they look through a large telescope.

Saturn, pale gold with faint bands, its thin rings crossing in front of it at a slant. — Saturn at 313 times through the 14-inch telescope the same evening, its rings tilted only a few degrees toward us, as they are in 2026. In-development capture, October 2026.

The deep sky

Galaxies, nebulae and star clusters are as bright as they really are, which is to say faint. At the eyepiece your eye is adapted to the dark, as an observer’s eye is after half an hour at the telescope, and the Orion Nebula’s bright heart stands out while its wings fade into the sky around it. As in real life, a bright Moon washes the faintest of them away, so the best nights for galaxies and nebulae are the dark ones around the new Moon.

The Orion Nebula, a gray cloud with a bright heart and sweeping wings, among the stars, with a smaller cloud above it. — The Orion Nebula through the 80 mm refractor before dawn on October 22, 2026, with the Running Man Nebula above it. In-development capture, October 2026.

Everything in the eyepiece is shown at the size it would look with your own eye at a real telescope, worked out from the size of your screen and how far from it you sit. A planet that looks small here would look just as small at the eyepiece of a real one.

True view

There is now a third way to see the Earth, besides orbiting it and flying over it: on foot, at an adult’s eye height, with the world at the size your own eyes would see it. Walk, run, crouch, crawl and jump. In deep water you swim, rising and falling as the swell passes under you. The open ocean has waves now, from long rolling swells to ripples a few inches across, and at sunset the Sun lays a glittering path across them.

The Sun a blinding glow just above the horizon of the open ocean, its light glittering in a path across the waves. — Sunset over the open Pacific, just above the waves. In-development capture, October 2026.

Look toward the Sun and you cannot make out its shape, any more than you could in real life: it is a blinding glare that washes out the sky around it. Only a camera with the right settings, or a proper solar filter, shows its disc. And when you want to know where you are, a map of the land around you is a key press away.

What comes next

Next come the events people travel to see: eclipses of the Sun and the Moon at their real times and places, the Moon turning copper red in the Earth’s shadow during a total lunar eclipse, and the guide ready to take you to the right spot to watch. After that, the Sun itself through a solar filter, and the great comets of the past.