What’s Up: October 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA

A Meteor Shower and the Moon Near the Pleiades See Saturn at opposition, catch the Orionid meteor shower, and watch the Moon pass close to the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. The institutional report frames the development in practical terms and ties it to the broader mission or observing effort.

This matters because astronomy does not advance on single detections. The field builds confidence by accumulating independent observations across different wavelengths, instruments and epochs until isolated signals become defensible conclusions. What looks convincing in one dataset can dissolve when a second instrument looks at the same target, and what looks marginal can solidify when follow-up campaigns confirm the original reading. The current standard requires that a result survive this triangulation before the community treats it as settled. 27, 28: The Moon passes near the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters Meteors streak across the sky during the 2017 Orionid meteor shower, with the Milky Way. NASA/JPL-Caltech On October 4th, Saturn reaches opposition, giving skywatchers one of the year’s best opportunities to see the ringed planet.

But just last month, observations using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revealed a ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling the planet’s south pole. NASA/JPL-Caltech The Orionid meteor shower peaks on the night of October 21st into the morning of October 22nd.

NASA/JPL-Caltech On the night of October 27th into the 28th, look for the Moon passing close to a famous star cluster called the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. A chart showing the phases of Earth’s Moon in October 2026.

I’m Raquel Villanueva from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and that’s What’s Up this month. Share Details Last Updated Oct 01, 2026 Related Terms Skywatching Earth’s Moon Meteor Showers Orionids Saturn Skywatching Tips The Solar System Keep Exploring Discover More Topics.

What gives the story weight is not just the object itself, but the way the measurement trims the range of plausible physical explanations. Astronomy has accumulated enough cases to know that the most interesting results are rarely the ones that confirm expectations cleanly; they are the ones that confirm some expectations while complicating others, or that open a parameter space that previous instruments could not reach. The scientific community evaluates these contributions by asking whether the new data constrain a model in a way that older data could not, and whether those constraints survive systematic review.

But just last month, observations using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed a ten-sided atmospheric wave encircling the planet's south pole. On the night of October 27th into the 28th, look for the Moon passing close to a famous star cluster called the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters.

Because the account originates with NASA News Releases, it functions best as a primary institutional report that is close to the data and operations, not as independent scientific validation. Institutional communications are produced by organizations with legitimate interests in presenting their work in a favorable light, which does not make them unreliable but does make them partial. Details that complicate the narrative, including instrument limitations, unexpected failures and results below projections, tend to be minimized relative to progress messages. Technical documentation and peer-reviewed publications, where they exist, provide the complementary layer that institutional releases cannot substitute.

The next step is to see whether other instruments and other wavelengths tell the same story. Campaigns with JWST, the VLT, the forthcoming Extremely Large Telescopes and radio arrays will provide the spectral coverage and spatial resolution needed to move from detection to physical characterization. The timeline for that kind of confirmation is typically measured in years, not months, which is worth keeping in mind when reading the current result.

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