Whats Up

All the Whats Up in the Nights Sky events

Can you see nebulas in other galaxies? Yes, some nebulas shine brightly enough — if you know how to look. Clouds of hydrogen and oxygen emit light at very specific […]

This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for […]

Eight billion people are about to disappear in this snapshot from space taken on 2022 November 21. On the sixth day of the Artemis I mission, their home world is […]

Very faint planetary nebula Abell 7 is about 1,800 light-years distant. It lies just south of Orion in planet Earth’s skies toward the constellation Lepus, The Hare. Posing with scattered […]

The silhouette of an intriguing dark nebula inhabits this cosmic scene. Lynds’ Dark Nebula (LDN) 1622 appears against a faint background of glowing hydrogen gas only visible in long telescopic […]

A mere 56 million light-years distant toward the southern constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is an enormous barred spiral galaxy about 200,000 light-years in diameter. That’s twice the size of our […]

The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. The featured picture, an attempt to show how Io would appear in the “true colors” perceptible to the average human […]

These cosmic clouds have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. Called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula to evoke the […]

The dark-floored, 95 kilometer wide crater Plato and sunlit peaks of the lunar Alps (Montes Alpes) are highlighted in this this sharp telescopic snapshot of the Moon’s surface. While the […]

The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one […]