The bestselling author discusses his inspiration, creative process, and favorite scientific tidbits behind the feature film.

The Moon passes 4° north of Jupiter at 8 A.M. EDT. By evening, they are high overhead in Gemini the Twins, now nearly 8° apart as the Moon sits near Pollux, the slightly brighter of the two brothers’ ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Born March 21, 1866, in New York, Antonia Maury was born into a family with an astronomical legacy: Her grandfather, John William Draper, was the second person to photograph the Moon (and the first ...

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 ...

French inventor Louis Daguerre, pioneer of the early photography process of daguerreotypes, is believed to have captured the first photo of the Moon on Jan. 2, 1839. However, the quality and other ...

Amateur astronomers dubbed this object M110 in the 1960s, so we choose not to include it. Charles Messier’s list stops at 103 objects. Historically, that should be the last word, but it would be hard ...

The simple answer is that Saturn’s rings do cast shadows on the planet’s surface! NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, took the dramatic image of the rings’ shadows on ...

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 ...