Asteroid 3200 Phaethon’s annual gift to planet Earth always arrives in December. Otherwise known as the Geminid meteor shower, the source of the meteroid stream is dust shed along the […]

Happy Solstice! Today is the December solstice, marking an astronomical beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere and winter in the north. On its yearly trek through planet Earth’s skies, […]

Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens. Popularly called Thor’s Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized […]

What’s causing the commotion in the Tadpole Nebula? Star formation. Dusty emission in the Tadpole Nebula, IC 410, lies about 12,000 light-years away in the northern constellation of the Charioteer […]

Do you know the names of some of the brightest stars? It’s likely that you do, even though some bright stars have names so old they date back to near […]

Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this stereo scene from Taurus-Littrow valley on the Moon! The color anaglyph features a detailed 3D view of Apollo 17’s Lunar Rover […]

Returning from beyond the Moon, on December 11 the Orion spacecraft entered Earth’s atmosphere at almost 11 kilometers per second. That’s half the speed of the grain of dust that […]

On December 8 a full Moon and a full Mars were close, both bright and opposite the Sun in planet Earth’s sky. In fact Mars was occulted, passing behind the […]

Why is the Moon so dusty? On Earth, rocks are weathered by wind and water, creating soil and sand. On the Moon, the history of constant micrometeorite bombardment has blasted […]

Can the night sky be both art and science? If so, perhaps the featured image is an example. The digital panorama was composed of 10 landscape and 10 sky images […]