A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed, would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late last […]

Cosmic dust clouds and young, energetic stars inhabit this telescopic vista, less than 500 light-years away toward the northern boundary of Corona Australis, the Southern Crown. The dust clouds effectively […]

Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies 5 million year young star cluster NGC 602. Surrounded by natal gas and […]

Vivid and lustrous, wafting iridescent waves of color filled this mountain and skyscape near Tanndalen, Sweden on January 3. Known as nacreous clouds or mother-of-pearl clouds, they are rare. This […]

Perihelion for 2020, the point in Earth’s elliptical orbit when it is closest to the Sun, occurred on January 5th. The distance from the Sun doesn’t determine the seasons, though. […]

Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy engages in a sort of galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that are too close and are captured by the […]

Rippling dust and gas lanes give the Flaming Star Nebula its name. The orange and purple colors of the nebula are present in different regions and are created by different […]

Some cloud patterns on Jupiter are quite complex. The featured tumultuous clouds were captured in May by NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft currently orbiting our Solar System’s largest planet. The image […]

On some nights, the sky is the best show in town. On this night, the sky was not only the best show in town, but a composite image of the […]

Like salsa verde on your favorite burrito, a green aurora slathers up the sky in this 2017 June 25 snapshot from the International Space Station. About 400 kilometers (250 miles) […]