Last summer seems so long ago, but a story we published this week got me thinking about a special experience I had in early September. I was at our family cottage on northern Georgian Bay with my daughter and son-in-law, who has an app on his phone that alerts him when the International Space Station is flying overhead. His phone went off just after dusk one night and so we rushed outside to look for the orbiting station. A few minutes later, a large and bright light traversed the sky on a southwest-to-northeast axis. It was quite the sight. Northern Georgian Bay is one of many places in Canada that’s superb star gazing territory – the lack of urban light pollution allows the Milky Way to gloriously project across the sky. I thought seeing the Space Station was something special, but then I read this great piece by Samantha Lawler, an assistant professor of astronomy of the University of Regina. She points out that SpaceX (which sent four astronauts to the International Space Station this week) will soon launch thousands of satellites into earth’s orbit. “No longer will you escape your city for a camping trip and see the stars unobstructed: you will have to look through a grid of crawling, bright satellites no matter how remote your location,” wrote Prof. Lawler.

Her article was one of our most-read stories of the last week. For your weekend pleasure, I’ve assembled the stories that were the most popular with our readers this week, as well as some of the most-read stories from other editions of The Conversation global network.

Have a great weekend and we’ll be back in your Inbox on Monday.