Does the Sun return to the same spot on the sky every day?  No.  A more visual answer is an analemma, a composite of sky images taken at the same […]

If you could stand on Mars — what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a […]

This galaxy is unusual for how many stars it seems that you can see. Stars are so abundantly evident in this deep exposure of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 because […]

What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine […]

The large stellar association cataloged as NGC 206 is nestled within the dusty arms of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy along with the galaxy’s pinkish star-forming regions. Also known as M31, […]

How different are these two streaks? The streak on the upper right is Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas showing an impressive dust tail. The comet is a large and dirty iceberg that entered […]

This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy — or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy is one of the […]

One of the most identifiable nebulas in the sky, the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, is part of a large, dark, molecular cloud. Also known as Barnard 33, the unusual shape […]

What lies at the center of our galaxy? In Jules Verne’s science fiction classic, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Liedenbrock and his fellow explorers encounter many […]

In an interplanetary first, on July 19, 2013 Earth was photographed on the same day from two other worlds of the Solar System, innermost planet Mercury and ringed gas giant […]