Journey Through New Zealand’s Night Skies

Lecture in English by Egor Goryachev (Astrophotographer)

Friday, 3rd July 2026, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Straße, 81671 München

New Zealand is renowned for its breathtaking landscapes and for offering some of the most pristine night skies in the Southern Hemisphere. Thanks to its low population density, light pollution is minimal, and in certain remote areas you can even experience truly dark conditions, where the sky appears in its purest form. What stunned me most was how rapidly the scenery changes. Every half hour of driving reveals an entirely new landscape, giving the country an extraordinary sense of diversity within relatively short distances. If you’re traveling to New Zealand with astrophotography in mind, the South Island should be your top priority. The regions around Mount Cook and Lake Tekapo are particularly exceptional. They are located within a designated International Dark Sky Reserve, providing some of the darkest and clearest skies on Earth. Because New Zealand sits further south than other famous dark-sky destinations such as Namibia, the Atacama Desert, or parts of Australia, southern constellations and celestial objects rise higher above the horizon. Even the Milky Way reveals a slightly different perspective, one that’s difficult to experience elsewhere. The idea of capturing these unique views filled me with excitement and that’s exactly what I hope to share with you.

If the skies are clear, guests are invited to visit our rooftop observatory after the talk and enjoy the views with our telescopes.

Credits: Egor Goryachev

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Unlocking a sea secret: the Antikythera Mechanism

Lecture by Dr. Markos Skoulatos (TU Munich) – in English

Friday, 8 Mai 2026, 8 p.m.

Without any doubt, the oldest computer of mankind, known as the Antikythera Mechanism, is the greatest technological achievement of antiquity. A century was necessary in order to reveal its secrets. What is it though, that inspires until now four generations of scientists?
In this talk, we will navigate from its discovery by sponge divers, up to the latest word of modern technology in order to solve its puzzle. I will analyse its functions, epicyclic and differential gearings, the indications it gives us and how to read them. We will see how astronomy, mathematics and engineering, all come together at a small portable mechanical device. At the end, there will be an opportunity to see from close my real model reconstruction. Our purpose is to familiarise with this “mysterious” construction as well as to individually discover what it is that inspires, still, despite 2 millennia from its original construction.

More info: http://www.eternalgadgetry.com

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Exoplanets & the Search for Life in the Nearby Universe

Lecture in English by Prof. Dr. Kevin Heng (LMU)

Friday, 27 March 2026, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

Exoplanets are planets orbiting other stars, beyond the Solar System. The first exoplanet was found in 1995 by my former Swiss colleagues in Geneva. Since then, more than 6000 exoplanets have been discovered. A major revelation is how common small exoplanets are: between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. A current quest of exoplanet science is to use the atmospheres of these exoplanets to understand if they are geologically active and/or are habitable using both the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. I will describe the long road towards using next-generation telescopes to detect biosignatures on Earth-like exoplanets, thus completing the modern version of the Copernican revolution started by Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor in 1995.

credits: NASA (R. Hurt)

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The Weather Forecast That You, Hopefully, Will Never Need!

Lecture in English by Can Akin (University of Bern, LMU)

Friday, 13 March 2026, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

Over the past thirty years astronomers have discovered thousands of planets orbiting other stars, worlds unlike anything in our Solar System. But how can we study the atmosphere of a planet we cannot visit, barely see, and that even our most powerful telescopes usually cannot resolve as a dot? By measuring tiny changes in starlight we can not only detect these planets, but also identify gases and clouds in their atmospheres. In my research I focus on two particular types of objects: hot Jupiters, gas giants heated to extreme temperatures by their parent star, and free-floating brown dwarfs, objects heavier than planets but too small to shine like stars. Together they reveal remarkable weather, including supersonic winds and clouds made from rock-forming minerals. In this talk, I will show how we combine astronomical observations with computer simulations to understand how these atmospheres work.

Making sense of these distant climates requires more than observations alone. We use atmospheric circulation models, originally developed for predicting weather on Earth, and adapt them to conditions far beyond anything found here. These simulations reproduce global winds and heat transport and allow us to create synthetic observations that telescopes can directly compare with measurements. By combining data and models we can infer atmospheric composition, understand how these worlds form and evolve, and place our own Solar System within the broader population of planets in our galaxy.

credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Building Universes: Modeling the Cosmos with Supercomputers

Lecture in English by Dr. Aniket Bhagwat (MPA Garching)

Friday, 6 February 2026, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

How do we create a Universe? In this talk, I take you inside the world of computational astrophysics, where Universes are born from the laws of physics on supercomputers. Starting from a nearly uniform cosmos just after the Big Bang, numerical simulations follow the growth of structure as gravity draws matter together, gas collapses and the first galaxies ignite with stars and light.
Across 13.8 billion years of cosmic time, these simulated Universes evolve from simplicity into complexity: the cosmic web, dark matter halos, luminous galaxies, exploding stars and supermassive black holes that shape their surroundings. By turning equations into evolving worlds, supercomputers allow us to trace how galaxies form, change and interact with their environments—connecting the early Universe to the structured cosmos we see today.
But how real are these virtual Universes? Which physical processes truly shape galaxies across cosmic time? What have we learnt so far and what pressing questions keep astrophysicists up at night? Come learn how numerical simulations help us understand the astrophysics of our Universe.

credits: Dr. Aniket Bhagwat

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BepiColombo – Getting to, surviving, and studying Mercury

Lecture in English by Jamie MacLeod (R&D Engineer, Ansys MotorCAD)

Friday, 28 November 2025, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

BepiColombo is an ambitious mission to Mercury, built jointly by ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency), and hopes to study both the planet surface and the magnetosphere, giving us further insight into how planets form. The talk will give an overview of some of the daring engineering involved to get to Mercury and survive so close to the sun, and the science interest and instruments on board the spacecraft.

credits: ESA

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Spooky Astronomy (English lecture)

English Halloween lecture – costumes welcome!!

Spooky Astronomy

by Paul Salazar (Munich Public Observatory)

Friday, 31 October 2025, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

A faint nebula that looks like a supernova remnant like a monster jumping right at you, galaxies in the shape of a mysterious cartwheel, UFO’s that the US military cannot explain, signals from space that make you say “Wow!” – and what about faces on Mars and Jupiter’s ghost? Lots of spooky things going on in the universe: we will share many stories of these but also spooky real-world topics such as Near-Earth Asteroids and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Tickets : €10 / €7
Admission from 7:45 p.m.
Number of seats is limited. Advance booking required.
Please make your booking in good time.

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Special Lecture: Let’s talk Astrophysics

Lecture in English by Dr. Ioannis Kamaretsos (Munich Public Observatory)

Friday, October 17th 2025, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

This lecture is part of a series on selected topics in Astrophysics. Let us become acquainted with recent discoveries, while placing focus on the ideas behind the published works. Following the 50min-long lecture, we may continue with discussions on the rooftop area.

Topic: Large scale structure of the Universe, and the curious case of a statistical anomaly in the rotational direction of spiral galaxies in deep surveys from HST and JWST. Is the Universe rotating in its entirety? Bonus question: could our known Universe lie in a black hole, within a parent universe?

credits: handmadewriting

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The Vera C. Rubin Observatory – the first of its kind

Lecture in English by Paul Salazar (Munich Public Observatory)

Friday, 26 September 2025, 8 p.m.
Venue: Volkssternwarte München, Gisela-Stein-Str. Ecke Ludwig-Jung-Bogen, 81671 München

The talk will focus on the design, development and first images from the observatory, and will provide insight how this kind of system brings a unique perspective into the modern world of scientific discovery of the cosmos.

The 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope at Rubin Observatory, equipped with the LSST Camera — the largest digital camera ever built — will take detailed images of the southern hemisphere sky for 10 years, covering the entire sky every few nights and creating an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition, time-lapse record — the largest astronomical movie of all time. This unique movie will bring the night sky to life, yielding a treasure trove of discoveries: asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, and supernova explosions.

credits: Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/B. Quint

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⇒ deutsche Version des Vortrags 4 Wochen später am Freitag, 24. Oktober, um 20 Uhr!

Colloquium – Let´s talk Astrophysics

moderated by Dr. Ioannis Kamaretsos (Volkssternwarte München)

Friday, 20. June 2025, 8pm
Volkssternwarte München, Rosenheimer Str. 145h, 81671 München

This is part of a lecture series on selected topics in Astrophysics. Let us become acquainted with discoveries in Astrophysics. The focus is on the ideas and theory behind the published work.

Following a 50min lecture, we will continue with discussions.

Event topic: ‚Exploding‘ stars and T Coronae Borealis: Can you predict the next outburst? T Coronae Borealis, a.k.a. the „Blaze Star“, is a recurrent Nova located in the constellation Northern Crown. It is a binary system which undergoes huge brightness increases every ca 80 years, making it a unique astronomical event.

Image: handmadewriting

Free entry
Advance booking recommended; limited number of seats.

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