The Night Sky, Explained — by Dmitry Shteynbuk.
A visual knowledge hub for stargazing, the solar system, stellar physics, telescopes, and the history of how we mapped the universe.
Tonight from Dmitry Shteynbuk
Eight ways to enter the sky
Night Sky Basics
The celestial sphere, constellations, magnitudes, and how to learn the sky with your eyes. Start here if you've never really looked up.
The Solar System
Planets, moons, comets, and asteroids — and the mechanics of orbits that keep them in place. The neighborhood we live in.
Stars & Stellar Evolution
How stars are born, burn, and die; the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram; and where our Sun fits in the story.
Galaxies & Deep Sky
Nebulae, star clusters, the structure of the Milky Way, and the sheer scale of the universe beyond it.
Telescopes & Observation
Optics, mounts, eyepieces, and binoculars — plus honest guidance on what a first telescope can and cannot do.
Astrophotography
From phone-on-tripod star trails to tracked wide-field and guided deep-sky imaging. Techniques, gear, and workflow.
History of Astronomy
Ptolemy to Copernicus to Hubble — the instruments, catalogs, and observers who slowly figured out where we are.
Miami & South Florida Skywatching
Everglades and Keys dark-sky sites, Cape Canaveral launches seen from the beach, and the southern stars visible at 25° north.
Latest guides
Learning the Sky: Five Constellations That Anchor Everything
A stepwise plan for actually learning the night sky. Start with five anchor constellations and use them to find everything else — season by season.
Magnitude: How Astronomers Measure Brightness
The logarithmic magnitude scale — why lower numbers mean brighter, what the actual math is, and how to use it under real sky conditions.
The Celestial Sphere: How the Sky Is Organized
The imaginary sphere astronomers use to describe positions in the sky — poles, equator, ecliptic, and coordinates — explained in plain language.
Comets, Asteroids, and Meteors: What's the Difference?
Three small-body categories that get confused constantly, with clear definitions and the real numbers on size, orbit, and composition.
The Moon's Phases, Finally Explained Properly
The phases of the Moon are pure geometry: the Sun lights one hemisphere, and we see how much of that hemisphere from a different angle each night.
Why Orbits Work: Kepler's Three Laws in Plain Language
The three laws that describe every orbit in the solar system — stated in words, backed with real numbers for the planets, and grounded in Newton's gravity.
A working vocabulary of the sky
Dark skies at the edge of the tropics.
The Everglades and Big Cypress preserves hide some of the darkest skies in the eastern United States, and the Florida Keys open a clean horizon straight south over the Atlantic. From the Miami coast you can watch Cape Canaveral launches arc up out of the northern sky, and at 25° north the far southern constellations — Centaurus, Crux at its lowest — briefly clear the horizon in a way they never do from the rest of the mainland.
Dmitry Shteynbuk — Miami, Florida
I'm an astronomy educator based in Miami. I write and illustrate plain-language guides to the night sky — the kind of explanations I wish I'd had when I first tried to figure out what I was looking at.
The site is organized as a knowledge hub rather than a news feed: eight subject areas from naked-eye stargazing through the history of astronomy, each built from short guides, diagrams, and a nightly logbook of what's currently up.
My angle is South Florida — 25° north, warm humid nights, mangrove-dark preserves an hour from the city, and a working coastline that lets us watch rockets launch from Cape Canaveral. Most of what's here works anywhere, but Miami is where I actually observe from.