Dark, smooth regions that cover the Moon’s familiar face are called by Latin names for oceans and seas. That naming convention is historical, though it may seem a little ironic […]

How many sunspots can you see? The central image shows the many sunspots that occurred in 2025, month by month around the circle, and all together in the grand central […]

Raise your arms if you see an aurora. With those instructions, two nights went by with, well, clouds — mostly. On the third night of returning to same peaks, though, […]

What is Miranda really like? Visually, old images from NASA’s Voyager 2 have been recently combined and remastered to result in the featured image of Uranus’s 500-kilometer-wide moon. In the […]

An unusually active sunspot region is now crossing the Sun. The region, labelled AR 4366, is much larger than the Earth and has produced several powerful solar flares over the […]

Peering from the shadows, the Saturn-facing hemisphere of tantalizing inner moon Enceladus poses in this Cassini spacecraft image. North is up in the dramatic scene captured during November 2016 as […]

Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few […]

Active galaxy NGC 1275 is the central, dominant member of the large and relatively nearby Perseus Cluster of Galaxies. Wild-looking at visible wavelengths, the active galaxy is also a prodigious […]

Most galaxies don’t have any rings — why does this galaxy have three? To begin, a ring that’s near NGC 1512’s center — and so hard to see here — […]

Oh what a tangled web a planetary nebula can weave. The Red Spider Planetary Nebula shows the complex structure that can result when a normal star ejects its outer gases […]