What’s happening at the center of our galaxy? It’s hard to tell with optical telescopes since visible light is blocked by intervening interstellar dust. In other bands of light, though, […]

From a garden on planet Earth, 38 hours of exposure with a camera and small telescope produced this cosmic photo of the M81 galaxy group. In fact, the group’s dominant […]

What’s at the tip of this interstellar jet? First let’s consider the jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH […]

Sometimes, the Moon visits the Pleiades. Technically, this means that the orbit of our Moon takes it directly in front of the famous Pleiades star cluster, which is far in […]

How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The featured image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. Flocculent spirals […]

Why are there so many moonquakes? Analyses of seismometers left on the moon during the Apollo moon landings reveal a surprising number of moonquakes occurring within 100 kilometers of the […]

In dramatic silhouette against a cloudy daytime sky over Paris, France, gargoyles cast their monstrous gaze outward from the west facade of Notre Dame Cathedral. Taken on March 29, this […]

Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups. The four prominent galaxies seen in […]

Why does Jupiter have rings? Jupiter’s main ring was discovered in 1979 by NASA’s passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but its origin was then a mystery. Data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft […]

Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to Helene, small, icy moon of Saturn. Appropriately named, Helene is a Trojan moon, so called because it orbits at a Lagrange […]