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Picture of the Day

A tight view of the Moon's bright, cratered edge curving across the frame, with one large crater showing bright rays. Just below the dark edge of the Moon, a small pale striped sphere — Jupiter — sits in the black sky, nearly touching the limb.

Jupiter occulted

Katelyn Beecroft from London, Ontario, Canada

On the morning of Oct. 6, 2026, the waning crescent Moon — then about 20 percent lit — occulted Jupiter as seen from much of eastern North America. This imager, tracking by hand with an 8-inch Dobsonian reflector, stacked the sharpest frames from video shot with a ZWO ASI224MC planetary camera.

In the Sky

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$Photograph of the North America Nebula (NGC 7000) and the neighboring Pelican Nebula, a broad region of glowing pink-red hydrogen gas threaded with dark, jagged dust clouds. The larger pink nebula fills the left half of the frame, and the Pelican’s pink, wing-like ridge rises at center right beside a dark, star-speckled lane. A dense field of white, blue, and orange stars covers the entire frame, with a very bright blue-white star with diffraction spikes at the right edge.$

Observing