May always feels like a month of beginnings — longer evenings, brighter skies, and the first hints of summer. And this year, the night sky is giving us plenty to look forward to.

The Eta‑Aquariid meteor shower peaks on the 6th, skimming low across the pre‑dawn horizon. Venus reaches its highest evening altitude on the 14th, bright enough to cut through the twilight. And on the 19th and 20th, the Moon will slip past Venus and Jupiter in a pair of close approaches that should make the western sky feel unusually alive.

Even without full darkness this time of year, these moments are reminders of how much we learn simply by watching — by paying attention to light, motion, and timing.

And that’s been the theme of my writing recently: learning how we actually study strange things in space.
Not the dramatic, cinematic version — the real tools.
I’ve been diving into the methods scientists use to understand objects we’ve never touched and asked how:

1. A spectrum reveals composition, temperature, and motion
2. Radiometric scanners pick up narrowband spikes that shouldn’t exist
3. Synthetic‑aperture radar can map internal cavities
4. Isotopic ratios betray an object’s origin
5. Long‑baseline tracking shows when something isn’t following a natural path

None of this appears directly on the page when I’m drafting scenes.

But it shapes the way I think.
It’s the difference between writing “a strange object appeared” and writing something that feels like it passed through real instruments, real analysis, real uncertainty. It’s the approach I’ve always admired in The Expanse and in Andy Weir’s work — stories where the tools matter, and where the characters understand the universe by measuring it.
The more I learn, the more I appreciate the quiet skill behind it all: the ability to look at a handful of photons and say, “There’s something odd here.”

All this research has also nudged me into building something of my own — a little navigation tool that helps me keep my fictional universe honest. But that’s a story for next month.
For now, I’m simply looking forward to the sky this May, and to learning a little more about how we explore the unknown.

— Graydon

Astronomy data sources: Royal Observatory Greenwich, UK Meteor Network, and UK‑based planetary alignment forecasts.