Astronomy Staff, Author at Astronomy.com | Page 8 of 277

This illustration shows the approximate sizes of the planets relative to each other. The planets are not shown at the appropriate distance from the Sun. Credit: NASA.

The best times to see planets with a small telescope

Cover of Astronomy's Sky Guide 2024

Observing, Upcoming Events

Your guide to the sky in 2024

Thor's helmet.

Astrophotography, Deep-Sky Objects

101 Weirdest Cosmic Objects

NASA astronaut Christina Koch stops for a picture while replacing equipment on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Human Spaceflight, Science, Space Exploration

What are the hazards of living in space? Swollen heads, for one

A high point of the space race: Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin is photographed on the Moon.Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, commander, took this picture with a 70mm Hasselblad lunar surface camera. Credit: NASA.

Science, Space Exploration

Key dates in the space race from the 11th century to 1975

An end-on view of one of the first full-energy collisions between gold ions at Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), as captured by the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) detector. The collisions create a quark-gluon soup that reproduces the state of the universe less than 10 microseconds after the Big Bang. The tracks indicate paths taken by thousands of subatomic particles produced in the collisions as they pass through STAR's 3-D digitial camera. Credit: BNL.

Cosmology, Science

The science behind the Big Bang theory

open and globular star clusters

Galaxies, Stars

Why are open clusters and globular clusters found in different places?

What happens at the center of a black hole?

Illustration of how a radio telescope works

How do radio telescopes work?

Billions of years from now, the night sky will glow with stars, dust, and gas from two galaxies: the Milky Way, in which we live, and the encroaching Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Credit: Lynette Cook for Astronomy magazine.

Galaxies, Science

The Andromeda and Milky Way collision, explained

An image of the area surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, in X-ray and infrared light. X-ray: NASA/UMass/D.Wang et al.; IR: NASA/STScI

Exotic Objects, Science

4 of the weirdest objects in space

Mercury, shown in an enhanced-color image from NASA’s Messenger probe. Credit: NASA / JHU Applied Physics Lab / Carnegie Inst. Washington

Astronomy for beginners, Observing, Observing Basics, Planets

How to observe planets with a small telescope