August 2006
The world's best-selling astronomy magazine offers you the most exciting, visually stunning, and timely coverage of the heavens above. Each monthly issue includes expert science reporting, vivid color photography, complete sky coverage, spot-on observing tips, informative telescope reviews, and much more! All this in an easy-to-understand, user-friendly style that's perfect for astronomers at any level.
Features
Unlocking the solar system’s past
There’s a treasure trove locked inside meteorites, rare particles older than Earth.
Online extra: Stardust’s surprise
NASA’s mission to retrieve comet dust found material from the wrong side of the solar system.
Between a rock and a gas giant
Mars and Jupiter bracket a belt of mini-planets where action is the name of the game.
Earth under fire
Our planet’s surface is riddled with craters formed by high-speed cosmic impacts.
Blast from the past
Fifty thousand years ago, a multimegaton impact gouged out Arizona’s Meteor Crater.
Online extra: Causes of Earth’s mass extinctions
The Meteor Crater impact event killed off most plant and animal life in the near vicinity, but it was nothing compared to our planet’s mass extinctions.
Classic rock
Stone meteorites are the most common in space, but they’re tough to find on Earth.
The great interplanetary rock swap
Some meteorites come from the Moon, others from Mars. Here’s how they arrive.
Online extra: Park Forest: a modern L’Aigle
The 2003 shower of meteorites near Chicago was a replay of the event that gave birth to meteorite science.
Heavy metal
Iron meteorites make up less than 10 percent of space rocks but are easy to identify on Earth.
How to start your meteorite collection
Here’s everything you need to start acquiring space rocks.
Online extra: Bidding for meteorites on eBay
A meteorite specialist finds eBay to be a useful space-rock resource.
Rock-metal fusion
The rarest class of meteorites, stony-irons, also is the most beautiful.
Party with the Perseids!
The Perseid meteor shower is one of amateur astronomy’s great yearly social events.
Name that rock
Scientists classify meteorites by what they’re made of and where they come from.
Rock star
Meteorite dealer Robert Haag travels the world in search of space rocks.
August 2006 book reviews
Discover this month’s offerings of astronomy titles.
Departments
This month in Astronomy
Beautiful universe
Letters
Bob Berman’s strange universe
Glenn Chaple’s observing basics
News
The sky this month
New products
Book reviews
Online extra
Coming events
Advertiser index
Resources
Reader gallery
