Imagine traveling more than 600 miles from the only home you’ve ever known, to a mountain ridge you’ve never been to. It’s nighttime, completely dark, and you don’t have a map, GPS, compass, or sextant to guide you. Could you make it?

To reach this conclusion, Dr Warrant and his team captured 95 moths heading to their breeding grounds. Each was then put into a custom-made moth-friendly flight simulator under the open skies: a large transparent bucket-like enclosure with satellite images projected onto the bottom.

An Australian moth follows the stars during its yearly migration, using the night sky as a guiding compass, according to a new study. When temperatures heat up, nocturnal Bogong moths fly about 620 miles (1,