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Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are October’s major attractions. They offer stunning views at various times of night. In addition, Uranus and Mercury are occulted by the Moon, though both events are challenging observations. The month wraps up with a...

People have been exploring the surface of Mars for over 50 years. According to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, nations have sent 18 human-made objects to Mars over 14 separate missions. Many of these missions are still ongoing, but...

Not since Hubble's heyday has a space telescope captured our interest — or our news cycle — quite like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). And some of its latest photos are no exception. After months of calibrations, JWST released its...

It’s been six months since astronomy clubs around the globe hosted events for the Messier marathon. The goal of this single-night observing challenge is to catch all 109 deep-sky objects in French comet-hunter Charles Messier’s famous cat...

Are we alone? This question has plagued humankind since time immemorial. And yet, we still don’t have a conclusive answer. Despite our incredible technological advancements, we have never received a credible radio signal from, or even the teeni...

Just 2° northeast of 6th-magnitude 6 Comae Berenices is 9th-magnitude M100. Located some 55 million light-years distant, it is the Virgo Cluster’s brightest spiral galaxy. The galaxy was another find in 1781 by French comet hunter Pierre M&...

Zipping through space at some 14,000 mph (22,500 km/h), NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into the surface of a small asteroid on Sept. 27, 2022. Despite the modest mass of the buggy-sized spacecraft, the collision ejected large plumes of material that ...

The 2022 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to a trio of scientists for pioneering experiments in quantum mechanics, the theory covering the micro-world of atoms and particles. Alain Aspect from Université Paris-Saclay in France, John Cl...

The solar system is surrounded by a colorful array of stellar neighbors. Within about 30 light-years of Earth, there are 74 main sequence stars, 284 red dwarf stars and 21 white dwarfs. These stars are attractive targets for exoplanet hunters because...

Crisp winter nights bring us a glorious naked-eye treasure: the Hyades. This V-shaped gathering of suns has been recognized as a celestial bull since at least 4000 b.c., when the Sun resided among its stars during the spring equinox — a hopeful...

NASA’s Juno spacecraft just made the closest flyby of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, in over two decades. Juno swept within 219 miles (352 kilometers) of the icy world on Thursday, Sept. 29. The pass was only a mile shy of the closest visit on r...

In the last decades of the 15th century, Western Europe experienced a metaphorical Big Bang — a sudden explosion of geographical knowledge that was later dubbed the Age of Discovery. Improved sailing ships carried profit-minded crews into uncha...

This month, Apple released the iPhone 14 Pro with a 48-megapixel camera — the highest resolution camera ever in an iPhone. However, the camera also has the flexibility to produce a 12-megapixel image. With this latest generation of iPhones, Apple joi...

Friday, September 30 Asteroid 4 Vesta lies near M30, a densely packed globular cluster in the constellation Capricornus, tonight. The main-belt world is currently magnitude 6.7, which you can easily net with binoculars or a small scope. Similarly, M3...

The Trifid Nebula (M20) is the trifecta of deep-sky objects: It combines a blue reflection nebula with an emission nebula glowing in red Hydrogen-alpha (Hα) light, all divvied up by opaque lanes of dark nebulosity threaded throughout. For all...

As its first image, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed the deepest infrared image of the universe to date. The image is teeming with thousands of galaxies, including some from when the cosmos was less than a billion years old. These earl...

The story of the Moon is deeply connected to the story of our own planet. We’re sharing space – literally – with it, and everything we learn about the Moon helps us better understand the Earth and our place in the solar system. And many of us have a ...

Most infrared light from outer space never reaches the ground. It’s absorbed along the way by plentiful water in Earth’s atmosphere. So if astronomers want to observe that distant light, they have to get creative. For years, particularl...

As Hurricane Ian gained momentum early this week, hurling its way toward Florida’s coast, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on Monday moved the Artemis 1 Moon rocket off historic launch pad 39B. The SLS megarocket was transp...

In our search for life beyond Earth, the ocean worlds — icy moons with deep seas — have become primary targets. But these exotic moons have one problem: Their oceans, which astrobiologists think may host life, are trapped beneath miles of...

Located in Serpens Caput, a constellation with few deep-sky objects, Seyfert’s Sextet was one of the first compact galaxy groups ever noted. That occurred in 1948, when astronomer Carl Seyfert discovered that the previously cataloged NGC 6027 w...

Why are planets and stars round? Richard Fulton San Diego, California Small celestial bodies, like comets or dwarf planets, can sometimes have bizarre shapes — just look at ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar visitor whose strange, elonga...

In a world first, NASA has crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in an attempt to push the rocky traveler off its trajectory. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test – or DART – is meant to test one potential approach that could prevent an asteroid from...

Within the constellation Scorpius the Scorpion lies another galactic arthropod, the Lobster Nebula (NGC 6357). And recently, this Lobster was photographed by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tol...

Editor's note: Jupiter's opposition occurred on Monday (Sept. 26) at 4 P.M. EDT. However, if you plan to observe the gas giant, it will continue to be near its finest for the next few weeks. In 2022, Jupiter reaches opposition — the point in ...

In 1665, while observing Saturn (which was located in Sagittarius at the time), German astronomer Johann Abraham Ihle came upon an unexpected sight. Just over 2° northeast of 3rd-magnitude Kaus Borealis (Lambda [λ] Sagittarii) at the top o...

Early in the morning on Dec. 6, 2020, JAXA’s Hayabusa2’s sample-return capsule streaked through the sky over Woomera, Australia. The heat-shielded capsule, packed with material blasted from the surface of asteroid Ryugu in 2018, descended...

How do we create telescopes that see different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum? Frank Coulter Pauanui Beach, New Zealand The range of colors or wavelengths that a telescope can observe depends on the design of both the telescope itself ...

Move over, Bruce Willis. Your asteroid-deflecting services — dramatically portrayed in Armageddon — are no longer needed. At least, we hope so. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft is set to impact the tiny a...

Friday, September 23 Mercury reaches inferior conjunction at 3 A.M. EDT. But never fear, it won’t be gone for long — we’ll start to see it in the morning sky early next month. A few hours before the Sun rises, Mars stands high in...

M55 is one of the most unsung yet beautiful globular star clusters in the night sky. It’s also one of the most southerly globulars in Charles Messier’s catalog. Abbe Nicolas Louis de Lacaille discovered it in 1751 while surveying the sout...

Dear Starmus Festival, It’s Sammy here. I’m not sure if this is a closure or the beginning of a new chapter in my life. You see, I’m a sixth-year medical student in Yerevan. Yes, the city you stormed into so unexpectedly but left to...

A dozen years ago, two inventive minds got together and launched the Starmus Festival, an international celebration of science and music. Its creators, astronomer Garik Israelian and astronomer/musician Brian May, envisioned a week in which anyone co...

The world of astronomy mourned the recent passing of Dutch-American astronomer Maarten Schmidt, the first person to measure the distance to a quasar. His groundbreaking work in the 1960’s greatly expanded the size of the known universe, providi...