To the eye, this cosmic composition nicely balances the Bubble Nebula at the right with open star cluster M52. The pair would be lopsided on other scales, though. Embedded in […]

This year an outburst of Perseid meteors surprised skywatchers. The reliable meteor shower’s peak was predicted for the night of August 12/13. But persistent visual observers in North America were […]

Famed in festival, story, and song the best known full moon is the Harvest Moon. For northern hemisphere dwellers that’s a traditional name of the full moon nearest the September […]

When does the line between night and day become vertical? Today. Today is an equinox on planet Earth, a time of year when day and night are most nearly equal. […]

Is this giant orange ball about to roll down that tree-lined hill? No, because the giant orange ball is actually the Sun. Our Solar System’s central star was captured rising […]

Stars are forming in Lynds Dark Nebula (LDN) 1251. About 1,000 light-years away and drifting above the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the dusty molecular cloud is part of […]

On Saturn, the rings tell you the season. On Earth, Wednesday marks an equinox, the time when the Earth’s equator tilts directly toward the Sun. Since Saturn’s grand rings orbit […]

In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp […]

There has been a flash on Jupiter. A few days ago, several groups monitoring our Solar System’s largest planet noticed a two-second long burst of light. Such flashes have been […]

Fans of our fair planet might recognize the outlines of these cosmic clouds. On the left, bright emission outlined by dark, obscuring dust lanes seems to trace a continental shape, […]