The world's best website for the the world’s best-selling astronomy magazine.

Top Stories

View All News

An artist’s conception shows the orbits of both the star (in blue) and the black hole (in red), dubbed Gaia BH3, around their common center of mass. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/Space Engine (spaceengine.org)

Exotic Objects, Milky Way, Science

Astronomers uncover ‘sleeping giant’ black hole Gaia BH3, the largest ever found in the Milky Way

Science, Solar System

Aurorae throughout our solar system and beyond

Observing, The Sun

These are the safe ways to look at the Sun (and you know you want to)

Solar System, The Sun

A solar storm the size of the Carrington Event could knock out the backbone of the Internet

Picture of the Day

See all photos

Galactic cirrus

Josh Jones, taken from Pendleton, Oregon

Mandel-Wilson 1 (MW1) is not a traditional deep-sky object — rather it is made of extremely faint, wispy gas that lies outside the plane of our galaxy. While it appears to surround Polaris, it is in fact much more distant, lit not by a single star, but the overall glow of the Milky Way Galaxy. This type of object is called an integrated flux nebula, and the clouds that make up such objects are sometimes called galactic cirrus. The imager used an 11-inch f/2.2 Celestron RASA astrograph to take 12.75 hours of data in RGB filters.