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

The Sun, along with more than 1,500 other stars, journeyed from the middle of the Milky Way to its current position a few billion years ago.

The Moon passes 5° north of Venus at 9 A.M. EDT, although neither is visible then. Instead, you can view them together in the evening sky. Some 40 minutes after sunset, the first bright stars are ...

Asteroid 7 Iris is drifting through Sextans, passing close to a close pair of stars that provides an anchor for those looking to watch the space rock’s movement across the sky. Step outside early this ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

America’s second satellite, Vanguard 1, was launched into space on March 17, 1958. And though it only blasted off some six months after the Soviet’s Sputnik satellite, Vanguard 1 still remains in ...

Planning to run this year’s Messier marathon? March 14/15 and 21/22 are the best nights to give it a go. Your ideal order will differ with latitude, but this is a good place to start. Be sure to set ...

The distant ice giant Uranus is located in Taurus right now, not far from the famous (and easy-to-find) Pleiades star cluster, cataloged as M45. Tonight, the planet also sits a short distance due ...

Look north this evening for Ursa Major the Great Bear, whose back half is best known as the Big Dipper. The two stars on the far end of the cup from the handle are called the Pointer Stars: These are ...