Exciting planetary action takes place this month. Venus and Uranus vie for attention and lie close to each other in late April. Jupiter offers a lot to observe through a telescope, particularly events ...

As the familiar wintertime constellations begin setting earlier each evening, it’s our last chance to catch some of the deep-sky treasures they contain. The constellation Monoceros lies east of better ...

From Earth, we only ever see one side of the Moon. This is because the time it takes the Moon to rotate around its own axis happens to be the same amount of time it takes for the Moon to orbit Earth: ...

NASA’s Van Allen Probe A re-entered Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, March 11, at 6:37 a.m. EDT, marking the final chapter for a spacecraft that reshaped scientists’ understanding of the radiation ...

Saturn reaches opposition at 2 A.M. EDT, visible all night and offering stunning views of its rings and moons. The ringed planet now rises around sunset and is highest around local midnight, when it ...

As close as we astronomers love to feel to space, one thing stands between us and the outer reaches: Earth’s atmosphere. More than 60 miles (97 kilometers) of gases separate us from the cosmos, and it ...

NASA is targeting April 1 for the launch of Artemis 2, with additional opportunities through April 6. The agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft completed their second rollout ...

As black holes feed, they pull material into a disk around them. The material orbiting in this disk gets heated to extreme temperatures, and so it becomes a plasma — a state of matter in which some of ...

Visible in Scotland, the total solar eclipse of Aug. 2, 1133, featured nearly 4½ minutes of totality. This eclipse provides just one of many historical examples of people wrongly associating a ...

Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation 19° from the Sun at 6 A.M. EDT. Now shining a bright magnitude 0, it stands 5° high in the east an hour before sunrise. The planet is now some 42 ...

This is the ideal night to run the 2026 Messier marathon. This annual event challenges observers to view every object in Charles Messier’s catalog in a single night, from sundown to sunup. According ...

High in the south this evening is Canis Minor the Little Dog, shining above the bright star Sirius, which lies closer to the horizon. True to its name, the Little Dog is a little constellation, ...