Watch Tim Peake’s spacewalk live

Using a wide-angle lens, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station captured a dramatic near-cloudless view of north Africa and the Middle East.

Urban dwellers may resign themselves to spotting the Moon, planets and the brightest stars with the unaided eye on a clear night, but every so often a bright satellite will catch your attention as it glides silently across the sky. The brightest is the 400-tonne International Space Station (ISS) whose orbit carries it directly overhead as seen from the British Isles and parts of Western Europe tonight.

An instrument aboard the International Space Station has detected a binary star system made up of a fast-spinning pulsar and a compact white dwarf that orbit each other every 38 minutes, a record for an accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar.