If you missed last year's meteor showers, supermoon, or total solar eclipse, don't dismay: There are plenty of spectacular celestial events to catch in 2018. Start with our January skywatching guide. This year, your resolution to watch as many of them as possible is more doable than ever. Along with a list of the year's biggest space events, The New York Times released a tool that allows you sync them all to your digital calendar in seconds.
Whether you use Google calendars or iOS calendars on your mobile device, the feature makes uploading the dates and descriptions of the year's most significant days for stargazers easy. Just follow the links provided to automatically input them into your account. This way, you won't forget to look up at the year's most dramatic cosmic displays no matter how hectic life gets.
With your calendar updated, now you can start planning for events like the total lunar eclipse of a super blue moon (January 31), the vernal equinox (March 20), and a partial solar eclipse (August 11). In addition to natural phenomena, The New York Times also includes events in space exploration. On May 5, for example, NASA could launch the Mars InSight spacecraft which will monitor the seismic activity of the red planet deep beneath its surface. That comes about a month after the March 31 deadline for the Google Lunar X Prize, the date by which participating companies must land a spacecraft on the Moon to win a cash prize.
While some of these events can be predicted down to the hour, others, like rocket launches, are subject to last-minute schedule changes. The New York Times plans to track the year's biggest dates in space as they develop and update their calendar accordingly.