A Saturday night out, 260 miles above London

Observers in the British Isles blessed with clear skies at dusk can see the 10-day-old waxing gibbous Moon pass in front of a naked-eye star known as kappa Virginis soon after 11pm BST tonight. Since the star disappears at the Moon’s darkened limb, it will be an easy target in most binoculars.

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying Britain’s Tim Peake, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, parachuted to the flat grasslands of Kazakhstan on Saturday, returning home from a six month mission to the International Space Station.

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, six or more years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has broadened the mission’s dark matter hunt using some novel approaches.