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Artemis 2 was was a breathtaking moment for us all. We were mesmerised by the four astronauts and the images they sent back to Earth. But so much lies ahead, and that’s the really exciting part. 

Artemis 3 will orbit the Earth and try out some of the equipment and manoeuvres that we just can’t test on Earth.

Artemis 4 will be truly amazing. That’s the mission that’s going to take people back to the surface of the Moon for the first time since 1972.

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Chris Stockdale is an award winning astronomer in the Gippsland area of Australia. His contribution to NASA's exoplanet research earned him the Berenice and Arthur Page Medal from the Astronomical Society of Australia. And he's an amateur. 

Chris uses an observatory in his own backyard to monitor candidate stars from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and studies their brightness over time. If the light dims by as little as half a percent, he's found another exoplanet, a planet that orbits a star in another part of the galaxy.

His exoplanet data also helps guide the James Webb Space Telescope, 1.5million km away in solar orbit. Incredible!

We had a chat with him about his observatory, NASA's TESS program, and some of the most fascinating planets in the solar system

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We instinctively think of planets as rocky or gaseous bodies orbiting a star like our sun, with sunrise, sunset, heating and maybe even seasons. But what if a planet didn't orbit a light source? What if it just floated through space vaguely orbiting the centre of the galaxy, but tugged this way and that way by nearby stars and stellar systems. These are rogue planets. No sunrise, no sunset, no heat from an outside source. Just starlight and blackness as it wandered aimlessly through lonely interstellar space. And they just might be the most common type of planet in our galaxy.

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Most people have looked to the skies and wondered if the universe has a boundary, or maybe it goes on for ever. The universe might be finite, with and end somewhere. Or, it might be infinite, with an infinite amount of space and matter. Both of thos throw up some mind bending questions, and maybe even real life duplicates of ourselves. Problem is, we would never be able to observe them, or even test for their presence, or even know if they exist. So does it matter?

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The launch window for Artemis II opens on 6 February 2026. Humans will fly a test mission, swinging around the far side of the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. There won’t be a landing, but just like Apollo 8 tested systems in the lunar vicinity before Apollo 11, Artemis II will test the modern systems under the same conditions the landing missions. There will be a crew of 4 including the first person of colour, the first woman and the first non American to fly beyond low Earth orbit. It really is a historic flight in so many ways.

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The Moon has a history longer than any of the features on Earth, but it isn’t as old as Earth. The Giant Impact hypothesis says that a Mars sized protoplanet collided with earth Billions of years ago and threw out enough of earth’s mantle to make the Moon. It’s an incredible story, and it might just have been the luckiest thing that ever happened for us. Without the Moon, life as we know it might never have existed.

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As the year winds down, let’s take a look at what the night sky has on offer in December 2025. The highlight has to be the Geminid Meteor Shower. Over a couple of nights this month, Earth crashes through the debris trail of asteroid 3200 Phaethon, producing a spectacular meteor shower. There’s a Supermoon in close proximity to the Pleiades star cluster, and we say goodbye to an interstellar traveller in 3I/ATLAS.

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We’ve detected many exoplanets and exoplanetary stems, they orbit stars in other parts of the galaxy. These planets form the same way our planetary did, they coalesce from a protoplanetary disc of gas and dust. Scientists have recently found a useful kind of substance - heavy water in one of these protoplanetary discs, and it’s told us a lot about how water might end up in planetary systems.

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A billion light years away, a billion years ago, two black holes spiralled toward each other and collided, we detected its gravitational waves in January 2025. We’ve detected many of these before, but this one was different. It was such a strong, clear signal that we could test laws of physics that had been proposed many decades earlier. It even put Einstein to the test.

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In 1975, an incredible and unlikely partnership resulted in the docking of a NASA Apollo capsule and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. The cold war opponents worked together to overcome not only engineering challenges, but the rivalry and suspicion of the cold war. 

This cooperation led to the Shuttle-Mir program in the 90s and the present day International space station. They all began with the spirit of cooperation from Apollo-Soyuz.

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